


Signs Following

by Vulgarweed



Series: The Bone Fiddle [12]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Allusions to Family Abuse, Appalachia, Appalachian Folklore, Canon-Typical Violence, Established Relationship, Established Sherlock Holmes/John Watson, Faith Healing, Folk Medicine, Historical - 1970s, M/M, Religion, Snake-Handling, Snakes, Story: The Adventure of the Speckled Band, religious homophobia, snakebite
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-28
Updated: 2018-03-20
Packaged: 2018-12-08 06:34:32
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 24,285
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11640954
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vulgarweed/pseuds/Vulgarweed
Summary: 1976. Bone Fiddle-verse; Appalachian AU. A couple years into their relationship, John and Sherlock are cozily setting up for spring with Mrs. Hudson's expert guidance when a distraught young woman appeals to them for help and sends them on one of their strangest cases yet - in order to solve one murder and prevent another, they must tangle with a sinister preacher and enter the much-sensationalized, little-understood world of Pentecostal Holiness believers who strictly observe Mark 16: 17-18.(And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; they shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.)Written forsignificanceofmoths, my second bidder in the Fandom Trumps Hate auction. Thank you for your generous donation to Planned Parenthood!Huge thanks toIwantthatcoat, beta reader supreme!





	1. Prologue (In the Garden)

**Spring, 1976**

“No, no, no,” Mrs. Hudson said emphatically. “You shouldn’t plant those on the new moon. It’ll just put up vines and that’s all. And you should never plant potatoes when the sign is in the heart, you won’t get hardly any at all. Potatoes like the dark nights so wait. Onions, same way. It’s just three more days and then you can plant those beans too.” She grabbed the young plants in their plastic bins and put them on the other side of herself as if to prevent John from doing something horrible to the poor dears. Like planting them.

Third year now John had helped Mrs. Hudson with her garden, breaking up the soil, plowing under the old to bring up the new. Third year now Mrs. Hudson had come up to help him with his - with theirs - his and Sherlock’s. Sherlock and his poisons, gradually letting the toxic experimental plants give way to edibles for humans and pollen producers for bees. It took a lot of hands-on work in the dirt with a lot of love in it to get Sherlock Holmes to at least fake being excited about fresh vegetables, even the ones that weren’t at all phallic-shaped. John was glad Sherlock liked his potatoes.

Third year now they’d gone through this - Mrs. Hudson stomping her feet about how Young People Today think they know better than the old folks. ‘You can scoff at the old ways, John Watson, but you wait and see who’s really got the beets and the beans, and you boys are wasting all your money at the store when you could be growin’ so much more on your own land if you just knew how to plant by the signs. ‘Course, you’re always expectin’ me to cook it for you anyway…’

John always nodded fondly through Mrs. Hudson’s chiding, because while he couldn’t be sure she was right about the moon phases and all that, he couldn’t exactly prove her wrong either. She did have a hell of a vegetable garden, reliably, every year -- even when the last frost came late, or there was too much rain, or not enough. And there was something about her calm certainty, and the way she never explained everything completely because she never thought for a minute she had to, well, that took John back to his childhood, listening to the old folks talk (not much older than he was now probably, but to a kid everyone with some lines in their face is ancient). There was something about that continuity that made him feel rooted and safe in ways he’d never be able to put into words.

The little smile on John’s face was partly for her but mostly for Sherlock across the yard, who was doing some work with the beehives, moving with calm, deliberate slowness and grace to keep his little charges calm and sweet, only rarely needing to puff at them with the smoker. His whole tall body seemed to relax as he took in their soft ambient hum. Though his face was mostly hidden, John couldn’t help but notice Sherlock did glance over more often when the weather got to warming and John wore less and less on his torso, bronzing in the sun as he went unprotected. 

John did so love to watch Sherlock in his strange self-contained happiness, beneath the mesh of that weird space-man gear that was just about the most unflattering item ever made for a human to wear. Not for the first time in three years, John mused that if Sherlock had been a woman, John would surely have tried to get him into a completely different kind of white outfit with a veil by now. And maybe the first few times he shocked himself a little with thoughts like that, but now they were just part of the regular background of his mind, familiar as the weather-beaten paint-peeling boards of the house and the porch railing he still put his feet up on even though it wobbled.

It wasn’t a hard, piercing kind of sadness, but it was the mild, vein-deep kind that didn’t go away easily. Wouldn’t make much difference either way, John thought, it’s not like they were going to make a baby who’d need an honest name, and it wasn’t like everyone who really mattered to them didn’t already know they shared a bed and more than that even, a life. No need to make a big production out of it. Maybe in Greenwich Village or San Francisco these days you could throw a party and make some promises and then walk about hand in hand, but that didn’t fly out here.

If Sherlock was bothered by that, John could never bring himself to ask. The facts in front of him were good facts: for nigh onto three years now they solved cases together, they defended each other with their lives, they fought a lot, and they made up by making love. Lots of real marriages did a lot worse.

Sheriff Lestrade’s first one, for example. Well, it was well and good that was history and finally, he and Dr. Hooper had been seen out and about. Yeah, of course John would stand up in the wedding party if Greg asked, he’d promised that years ago far into their cups long before he’d come close to getting the lady’s word on the matter. That had been the single biggest tipping point to make John willing to risk his and Sherlock’s secret - he trusted Greg with it, and also, Molly needed to know that the reason Sherlock wasn’t ever going to get with her wasn’t because of anything wrong with her.

But for now, Sherlock was in his element in a different kind of world. Occasionally he might huff and scoff at Mrs. Hudson’s talk of planting by the signs, her moon-gazing and weather-watching, and all her other crazy-quilt bits of ancient granny woman folklore and flat-out hedge magic - but his cagey look suggested he archived all of it for reference anyway. Probably to him it was just another matter of super-close observation, the way he was with his bees. He muttered to them softly when he took their hive apart and artfully juggled the heavy frames laden with honey, his voice in a similar timbre to their sleepy buzz. John still wasn’t quite ready to immerse himself in a cloud of the sting-bearing critters the way Sherlock did, but he loved to watch Sherlock’s big hands in their heavy gloves, only slightly less nimble than they were without them.

Loved to think of watching him peeling off those gloves, and the happy little breath Sherlock took when his skin felt the air again. He had fine downy hairs on the backs of his long, fair hands, visible only when sunlight caught them and then they seemed to have a halo. Sunlight turned his skin peachy white, and shone rich amber through the honey. John could all but see thick honey dripping from Sherlock’s fingertips, sticking in the tiny soft hairs of his skin, dripping heavy and sweet into John’s mouth . . . 

No wonder Mrs. Hudson probably thought John was kind of slow-witted, as she had to tell him the same fine points of gardening by the old ways over and over whenever Sherlock was out in the yard. _Gotta put your mind on a leash boy, it’s always wanderin’ away._


	2. Where Will You Run To

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For a young Pentecostal woman in a state of grief and fear, Sherlock is not the most reassuring of earthly saviors. Nevertheless, she persisted.

They were in a comfortable symbiosis now, the three inhabitants of this little spur of Route 221. John had been awed enough by Mrs Hudson’s encyclopedic knowledge of gardening techniques like she’d memorized the best parts of the Farmers Almanac all the years of her life - but then it had taken on new dimensions when he’d finally gotten a look at her root cellar and saw how deep she’d woven in the things Lestrade and Sherlock brought to her like dutiful sons. She had rows and rows of little brown bottles she’d made, tinctures of herbs and more arcane things (he was sure that some of the jars had tiny bones in them), and little specks of metal - symbolic ingredients as potent as literal ones. And she made them with the clear grain liquor that Lestrades had made in their stills in the woods for generations, and she made them with the natural preservative quality of the clear golden-brown honey and smooth-spreading beeswax from Sherlock’s hives.

She’d chewed up snuff in her mouth and spat it on John’s hand that first time he got stung, and he’d yanked it back in disgust as she laughed - but he didn’t wipe it off, too curious, and sure enough the pain had stopped and the swelling gone down.

He watched her boil water and decant oils, making what she called her ‘mother tinctures.’ Sherlock rolled his eyes and gestured rudely behind her back, but then he also occasionally leaned in close, eyes gleaming, and whispered “it’s ninety percent nonsense - but her maceration technique is flawless.”

Nonsense or not, nowadays when John got a sore throat, he wouldn’t have anything but her potent brew of wild ramps in honey, and he hardly bought any of his pain pills or ointments from the store anymore when her drawing salve and laborer’s liniment were all the best. Sometimes Mrs Hudson would rub it into his aching shoulder herself and sometimes the massaging hand was Sherlock’s - whether it was the herbal potions themselves or the caressing touch of different kinds of care that did most of the work, John neither knew nor cared.

Nor was he surprised to glimpse Molly Hooper arriving and leaving Mrs Hudson’s cottage once in a while. There’s not much a granny woman needs from the world, except someone to pass her knowledge on to.

 

***

John had been just about to lose ten more bucks to Lestrade when he heard first Mrs. Hudson’s friendly call-out and then the doorbell. “Are you decent?” she yelled as he came towards the door. “Is he decent?”

“As decent as he ever is,” John said smiling, and then did a double take when he saw Mrs. Hudson wasn’t alone. 

“I brought someone to see you boys,” Mrs. Hudson said. “I found her wandering around down the lane and she wasn’t real sure if she ought to come up. She knew she wanted to see Sherlock, but I think she was about to chicken out when she saw the Sheriff’s car. No offense dear, but if you need help then you need to go through with it.”

“Thank you, ma’am.”

John could see the young woman was plain-dressed - baggy cotton dress in a discreet pale blue, never-cut hair past her waist. These days sometimes at a glance you could take them for hippies, if the hippies weren’t feeling very colorful, but this lady had the look in her eyes too. She was probably younger than she looked - care and fear and too much Jesus and humility gave her a downcast appearance, and she didn’t look like she slept well. John didn’t want to make light of anyone’s beliefs, but he worried about the Holiness girls sometimes. The men could take care of themselves.

None of his business.

Leave the making light of people’s beliefs to Sherlock - she’d have to be real desperate to throw herself on his mercy. Still, John and Sheriff Lestrade didn’t make any effort to hide their friendly card game or the clear glasses of the Lestrade family’s finest. Best for the lady to understand right off that she was among sinners - and safer here than home, if she was a typical Sherlock client. He escorted her into the parlor where Sherlock was holding court, and she sat carefully on the ragged old chaise lounge. _Hope she doesn’t pay too much attention to the stains,_ John thought. That couch is awfully unholy for a holy roller.

“Helen Stoneman, sir,” she said quietly.

“Like the Virginia Stonemans?” Lestrade blurted. “I see them on _Hee Haw_ sometimes.”

“Ridiculous show, trading in cartoonish regional stereotypes to draw in a national audience that knows nothing about the culture and couldn’t care less for anything but singing and clowning,” snapped Sherlock.

“Yeah maybe,” Lestrade said defensively. “But that lady banjo player is really good.”

“We don’t watch TV,” said Helen Stoneman, a little sadly.

“No, you wouldn’t, would you?” Sherlock blurted. “You’d like to if you hadn’t been convinced from a much-too-early age not only of the existence of the Devil but also the literal truth of all the most ridiculous folklore concerning him, including his hand in absolutely anything that’s remotely modern or entertaining. I’m not sure which aspect of me would be most offensive to your family and church - my atheism, my homosexuality, or my fiddle playing.”

“Sherlock!” both John and Lestrade barked.

“Why are you still here, Lestrade? Miss Stoneman might not want a lawman around for what she’s about to tell us.”

“Probably the fiddle,” said Miss Stoneman with a wry little smile she probably didn’t get much chance to use at home. “We’re more modern than you think, we got electric guitars in church. No fiddles though, not ever. And it’s all right. I think we are kin to them Stonemans but not real close. Even if we were, Papa wouldn’t have it, of course. But what we do ain’t illegal in this state.”

“Well, I was just headin’ out,” Lestrade said. He was a little put out at Sherlock’s rudeness as usual, but he wasn’t going to question it too hard since if he left now, that meant John wouldn’t get a chance to win his twenty bucks back right away. John shook his head ruefully as he gave Lestrade a little handslap. “Reckon you’ll call me if you need anything, all hours of the night, like you do. I’ll do the same.”

Sherlock paid them no mind at all. “You still want my help,” he said to Helen Stoneman, now sounding intrigued. “Even though you know I must be simply _crawling_ with demons.”

“If I wanted a demon cast out, I’d ask a preacher. I’d ask all the people to do it at the service,” said Helen, raising up her chin a little proudly. “But I wouldn’t know what to do if the demon was _in_ the preacher. I don’t know if you get what I mean, maybe. But I’ve heard tell you know a lot of things that other people don’t, and if there is a demon in you that can do that, maybe it’s stronger than the one I’m scared of.”

“I think I might very well know what you mean, Helen,” Sherlock said almost kindly, but his eyes were starting to dance with the joy of the game that was not always kind. “You’re in mourning. Someone close to you has recently died. The circumstances are suspicious - extremely so if you’d risk exposing yourself to worldly eyes outside the church fold.”

She nodded. “My sister.”

“You are conflicted about the manner of her death. You’re wary of police involvement even though her death is likely officially an accident.”

“Yes,” Helen said. “Julia was bitten by a snake, in a worship service. We believe that if the snakes are prayed over proper and the person is truly anointed and the Holy Spirit has come down, they aren’t as likely to bite. But sometimes they do and we know they do. We pray at least that the faithful will not die.”

“And yet she did. So Julia’s death is, in your barbaric worldview, proof of something deficient in her spiritual state, not of the simple fact that rattlesnake venom is frequently lethal to humans if not treated medically in a timely manner.”

“Well, not proof,” Helen said, clearly refusing to take the bait, and John liked her a lot for it. “Some people think that we think that God will always keep us from getting bit. We don’t think that, not really. He don’t. It happens. Everybody who’s been in the faith a while knows someone it’s happened to. We can’t control the hand of God. And it’s in the hand of God whether we live. We don’t question the Lord, sir.”

“Yes you do,” Sherlock snapped. “Or you wouldn’t be here talking to me.”

She leaned forward as far as she dared, her hands pressed demurely between her knees and looked sideways as if trying to spot invisible watchers. She lowered her voice. “I don’t question the Lord. I question my stepfather. In his house, sometimes it seems the same thing. But I don’t think it is.”

“You looked to the sides, not above. It’s worldly wrath you fear.”

“I think I as good as said as much, Mr. Holmes. My sister wasn’t a perfect Christian, none of us are, but she was humble and kind and loved by all who knew her. Yet the way she died - she didn’t deserve that! I know snakebite ain’t a nice way to go, but of course I’ve seen it before. This was worse. Such fear was upon her on her last night on earth, like she’d seen the devil hisself. She didn’t die at once, she lingered on and on for hours in agony, and she shook and screamed like demons were pulling her soul right out of her body.”

John braced himself for the inevitable snide remark from Sherlock, and tensed even more when it didn’t come. Sherlock’s eyes were glittering and unblinking and damned if he didn’t look a little like a fascinated and deadly reptile himself in that moment.

“There is more to this case than meets the eye,” Sherlock said. “And more than you’re telling me. Come on, I won’t help you if you hold back. You are screening your stepfather and your whole church community, I suspect. I know who you are and who he is. Tell me more about him. Your stepfather is Brother Roylott of the Stoke Moran Holiness Church of Signs Following, which is a grand and wordy name for a dingy little reincarnated gas station on a vine-grown stretch of gravel state road near the Kentucky border. I know the name because this is not the first time it’s come up in the context of dubious deeds. Tell me more.”

“He wasn’t always . . . Well, he was always a religious man, though Julia and I were real little when he married our mama and I don’t remember much from those days. She died years ago in a car wreck in Huntington, and after that he changed, got so much worse. She had some family land out by Mingo, it’d been a real nice place once, and he took us out there. She left us a little money too; he took that over. I don’t mind tellin’ you, sir, he wasn’t known to be a kind man and he had horrible fits of temper. People was afraid of him and I won’t say they was wrong to feel that way. We never really got to have friends, me and Julia, on account of him being so suspicious and mean. He was sure everyone was out to steal from him and no one was ever good enough for us and nobody really wanted to come over anyways. He took to drink for a while, then he’d give it up and swear Jesus cured him, then he’d go back on it.”

“It’s a pattern I’ve seen plenty of times,” Sherlock said. “It’s a tired cliche.”

“Yeah, and it really fucks real people up,” John snapped, and then bowed his head at Helen. “I apologize for my language.”

“I heard worse,” she said, “And from a preacher man too.”

“What I hear in your voice, is also on your wrists,” Sherlock said.

“You couldn’t have seen-“ Helen said, wringing her hands just above her long sleeves.

“I didn’t, but you just told me. It’s all right,” he said, and this time he broke all the way through to kindness. “Keep your bruises. I just want you to know that I understand your stepfather is a dangerous man and I take your case seriously.”

She nodded. “Thank you. He’s out at a men’s retreat and I reckon they’re going to go gather up some more snakes in the woods, that’s what they always do. I got a friend to bring me here who’s got a cousin ‘round here to visit. He better not ever know I was here.”

“No, he shouldn’t know that,” Sherlock said, leaning forward as his nose sniffed out intrigue. “You should stay with Mrs. Hudson until your friend comes back. She is an upstanding Christian lady who makes excellent cornbread and takes good care of her shotgun. We’re going to need to visit you, and we need to do it without him knowing. Can we manage that?”

“There’s a motel just down the road a ways from our house. It’s not a real nice place, but you could stay there. I’d be so much obliged.”

Sherlock nodded. “We’ll be there and we’ll be in touch. Is there anyone in your town you can trust besides the friend who brought you here? Are you sure you can trust that friend, for that matter?”

“I trust her with my life,” Helen said sadly. “Reckon I have to. And her brother’s a good man too for all that he’s a little simple. He does some yard work for my stepfather and looks after the snakes and his other animals.”

“Other animals?” Sherlock said, tilting his head. 

“He’s got a spotted cougar and a monkey. Keeps ravin’ about Daniel in the lion’s den, and how the sinners are crazy to think we came up from monkeys.”

“Illuminating,” Sherlock said archly. “And I appreciate the warning. Is it a small monkey or a big one?”

“Bout the size of a six-year-old child,” Helen said. 

Sherlock nodded as he filed this fascinating fact away. “Anything else I need to know about your immediate surroundings? Especially anything that’s changed fairly recently?”

“There are a bunch of hippies living out of campers just over the hill,” Helen said. “He always said we mustn’t ever go near them. I thought there was a chance that maybe one of them drugged her or something. I’ve heard of bad trips and it sure looked like she was having one.”

Sherlock said nothing at this but his face conveyed his disdain for this idea.


	3. Send Down the Rain, Lord

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Venomous snakes and dangerous men - one should always avoid provoking them. Unless one is Sherlock Holmes, and then sometimes one just can't help it.

“The plot thickens,” Sherlock said long after Helen was safely on her way back home. “Well, let’s go out and work on the old hearse a bit. I’d like to have her souped up before we drive out there later this evening. There’s a tire getting saggy, and this whole job sounds like a bad time to have car trouble.”

“You don’t think the hippies had anything to do with it,” John said.

“Highly unlikely,” Sherlock replied. “They’re a convenient scapegoat. Even though it doesn’t make a lick of sense for them to have messed with that family at all. All you have to do is persuade the faithful that demons are involved and off they go. Their faith makes them inclined to be credulous, and highly intolerant of difference or dissent, and they never feel as devoted as when someone makes them feel like righteous warriors. This kind of cult behavior functions best in the presence of perceived enemies, so a preacher has to invent some from time to time.”

The day had started out fair and fine for car-work, but dark clouds were beginning to loom over the little valley to the west, showing itself through gaps in the dark green hills. John jacked the old hearse up and Sherlock shimmied crablike underneath until just his long legs were emerging from the shadows.

Sherlock nearly hit his face on the chassis and scurried right back out again when he heard the sound of an approaching car, angry and fast up the treacherous little road. Route 221 itself was a defense mechanism that could slow an oncoming dangerous person dramatically, provide lots of time and warning for defense, or even on occasion - in cases of slick winter ice - get them off the road entirely.

“Expecting company?” John asked nervously.

“I wasn’t this morning,” Sherlock said. “Now I think we must. I’m not exactly shocked.”

“Wish Lestrade hadn’t left.”

“I don’t. We can handle this,” Sherlock said.

The old gray Chrysler came to a screeching halt much too close to John and Sherlock for comfort, and the man who got out of it was in their faces immediately. For all that he was a man of God by vocation, he looked like a hired bruiser - tall and thick and fiery-eyed, his sun-weathered face fierce with rage and hatred. He wore the uniform of the Christian fundamentalist aspiring to an image of stricter days - the black suit, the white shirt, the hair kept prudishly short and slicked-back. He loomed in any space he was in, seeming barely able to unfold himself out of the car. 

“Which one of you is Sherlock Holmes?” he demanded.

John moved slowly a few steps to his right, towards the passenger-side door of the hearse. He was pretty sure the Smith & Wesson .38 was still in the glove compartment from their last eventful road trip.

“I am,” Sherlock said flatly. “And I suspect I know who you are.”

“I’m Reverend Roylott, and I’ll thank you to keep your evil ways clear of me and mine, you meddler and you lawman’s-whore, your spying eyes for the worldly police. I know she’s been here, that wayward girl. We’ll cast the Devil out of her yet, mark my words!” His face grew florid as he leaned in much too close, nearly spitting in Sherlock’s face. “And out of you too if you mess with us, but I bet you’re so damned we’d have to kill you to do it. And don’t think we won’t.”

“Do you think it’s going to rain?” Sherlock asked. “I do. Smell it. Petrichor. I estimate probably about four and a half miles away, northwest. John here says the vegetable garden could use some rain. Personally, I think he just wants a day off watering.” He managed to look smug and imperious even with his hands and face streaked with grease. John watched veins in Roylott’s face and neck swell and pulse with every calmly insulting syllable. John’s own pulse raced, ready to pounce.

“What did that little bitch say to you?” Roylott screamed. 

“Language, Reverend,” Sherlock said. “If you’re not careful, you might give me the impression you don’t really care about your stepdaughter very much.”

“She’s a Jezebel and a traitor,” Roylott said. “She’s ungrateful and disobedient and soon it’ll be up to the Lord to save her soul for I’m about to give up trying. And if you cross me, if you stick your Godless-sodomite nose into my business, you’ll live to regret it - but only just long enough.”

“It’s been a lovely conversation but I’m going to have to ask you to be careful of the driveway on your way out,” Sherlock said. John couldn’t help but notice the way he landed on _lovely_ to give it an effeminate emphasis, the swishing in his steps, the slight limpness of his wrists. As if Roylott wasn’t incensed enough, Sherlock was gradually camping it up like an old Village queen. “We’ve gone too long without rain, and if you kick up too much dust it annoys the beesssss.”

“I am a dangerous man to fall foul of,” Roylott snarled. He snatched up the tire iron and, only grunting a little, bent it in a u-shape only slightly serpentine, and then threw it at Sherlock, who languidly, gracefully dodged it. “Get thee behind me, Satan,” Roylott muttered as he squeezed himself back into his car and hurled it back down the lane.

“I think Satan might be a few steps ahead of him still,” Sherlock said to John, grinning. “Look at you, bristling your quills up. He got too close to me, didn’t he? Do you think he wanted to kill me? Or fuck me? Either would be . . . ambitious of him.” Sherlock smirked as he picked up the bent tire iron. “I’m not quite the meaty slab of beef he is, but I can certainly be formidable in my own right.” He smoothly bent the tire iron back almost perfectly to its original shape.

“Pretty sure he wanted to kill you,” John said. “I’m the one who wants to fuck you. That’s one of the hottest things I’ve ever seen you do.”

“Mmm,” Sherlock said, licking his lower lip promisingly. “Keep that thought on file, John. We have a tire-change to finish and some driving to do very soon, and you know we shouldn’t leave Helen around that brute a second longer than we have to.”

“Fair enough but my file is gettin’ pretty full of filthy things I wanna do to you,” John said.

“We might be headed into deep waters ahead. Don’t get too distracted. Keep that tire iron in mind,” Sherlock said. “Or in your pants, whichever you prefer.”

“Might chafe a bit,” John said with a lusty grin.

“You always walk like that anyway,” said Sherlock. He swiveled his hips in a saucy way as he walked towards the house to pack up the things he’d need. John started to make a mental list of things to lecture Sherlock about before reaching enemy territory.

Sherlock’s packing for the short trip seemed very focused on his chemical laboratory - samples and slides and vials, and a small microscope that folded up neatly into a leather box about the size of an eyeglass case.

John’s packing for the short trip consisted of his most conservative clothes - he’d leave that sharp oxblood suede jacket at home this time, not like he’d be wanting it in this weather. You can’t go wrong with a plain white shirt and plain black pants, he supposed. His black dress shoes were mildly scuffed, but these people weren’t supposed to be earthly anyway. Ha, as if anyone who makes that claim refrains from judging by vanity, he thought to himself.

The rest of it was focused on his weaponry and his medical gear. He decided to toss in a few extra snakebite kits. Sharp little scalpels in a rubber case that split in half and doubled as a suction cup.

John was a little too intent on packing, if he let himself go. He ransacked all his old kit from Nam that he’d moved up into the big house. And he even went down to the old rotting trailer in the weed field to see if there was anything he’d missed.

Mrs. Hudson caught up to him halfway up the road. She put a little gingham drawstring-bag in his hand and chatted in his ear all the rest of the way up to the big house about what was in it and how to use it. Just in case, mind.


	4. Be Watchful Thou My Soul

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> To study snakes, you have to visit their den.

There were no major roads leading where they wanted to go, so they pushed the bouncing 4-wheel-drive vintage hearse over dust and gravel for many more long hours than it should have taken. Spring storms had reduced the dirt roads in some places to cracked and bumpy ruts. John pored over the maps in ever-growing frustration. “This road we’re on doesn’t even exist according to this map,” he grumbled.

“Then I think we can take it as a given that the map is wrong,” Sherlock said with that sideways smile of his that was endearing in good times and smug and grating in bad.

John was hungry, that was the problem. He reached for a drag from Sherlock’s cigarette as if that would help. He’d packed sandwiches but they were in the back of the hearse and he didn’t feel like crawling back there while they were moving. “Well, how do we know this road we’re supposed to turn onto exists, then?”

“I think we’ll find out when we see it, won’t we?”

Sometimes John didn’t feel like being reminded that for some people, Stanger looked almost like a city in comparison to where they lived - downtown, it even had streets with names and a few stoplights. People didn’t spend their whole lives far up in remote hollers nearly as much as they used to, but that landscape was still there all around them - the real backwoods. Nowadays John tended to calculate every distance by how long it would take rescue to arrive in a crisis. Most of the people way out here didn’t have that much more hope now than they would have had in horse-and-buggy days. Probably for the best that they were never going to give up their guns and their home remedies - better to put faith in what’s close to hand than in a promise that’s far away. Folks might believe in a Heavenly Savior but they didn’t have much realistic reason to hope for earthly ones.

Was that what made them more inclined to get extreme in their religion? Didn’t seem like that alone could explain it, but he knew the Holiness folks liked to try to remove themselves from the sinful world. They weren’t always very good at it. He’d known some that lived in town and had no qualms with wild living, knew how to draw a sharp rigid line between Saturday night and Sunday morning.

This wasn’t the time to speculate, he reckoned. Sherlock’s hands tapped impatiently on the steering wheel and his lips moved although he wasn’t saying anything John could hear.

Alright, gotta do this, John thought, and he reached over to push the divider behind the seats open. As he crawled back to get to the cooler with the sandwiches and pop, he definitely, definitively felt what could be nothing but a light slap on his ass. So Sherlock was not as thought-absorbed as he pretended to be.

“That what you want, Sherlock?” John asked as he slithered back into the passenger seat with a ham-and-cheese in hand. “You wanna handle the snake in my pants in front of the holy rollers?”

“You know they believe gay people are possessed by demons,” Sherlock said, deadpan.

“The way you act sometimes, I’m not sure they’re wrong.”

Sherlock snorted, and the sound was so endearing John just had to look at him, make sure Sherlock could see the rough affection on his face. “When we’re done with this case, we’ll examine some of the varying forms that _possession_ can take,” Sherlock said, his voice dropping to the registers that operated John’s cock like a marionette.

“Can you still teach me a new one after two and a half years?”

“I’ll consider that my next important case.”

John chewed his creamy, salty, meaty sandwich bite and briefly considered leaning over to feed Sherlock as a mother bird feeds her young, mouth to mouth. But the switchbacks were too sharp and Sherlock was already unfocused on his driving enough.

Sherlock just let his eyes visibly dart to the seams of John’s fly as he drove, and then he lit a cigarette with an eyebrow twitch and a rueful smile.

“I feel like we’ve been together long enough that I can almost follow your thoughts sometimes,” John said. “You’re thinking about that travel treat you’re not gonna get just now.”

Sherlock nodded and smiled. “I would say you’re getting better at this, except sex has always been your…area.”

“Playing the innocent don’t work with me, Sherlock, I know you too well. But now we’re going into your…area. Murder mystery. Where Julia Stoneman didn’t really die of snakebite.”

“She _was_ bitten by a snake, of course. But you heard the description Helen gave. Does that sound like a rattlesnake bite alone to you?”

“Well, panic could have set in as soon as she realized she wasn’t getting any better, speeding up the pulse is always bad when you’ve got venom in your veins, and she might have had some type of allergic reaction or had a health condition that made her more vulnerable…not that I think the doctor will tell us anything, but are we going to at least ask…?” Sherlock turned away from the road and looked at John longer than John felt like he should, and then the penny dropped. “There was no doctor, was there? They don’t believe in it, do they?”

Sherlock shook his head slowly and indulgently. “Probably a faith healing, for whatever that’s worth. Almost entirely for show on the good Reverend’s part.”

“What did the coroner say?” John asked as the sinking feeling sank deeper.

“You know perfectly well they wouldn’t let one near her,” Sherlock said. “She was in the ground the very next day. Who was going to question it?”

“I’m not digging her up,” John said.

“You always say you’re not going to help me dig up graves,” Sherlock said, chortling. “And yet, you nearly always wind up doing just that. But don’t worry, I don’t expect we’ll have to this time. Let Julia sleep. It’s Helen we have to pay attention to.”

***

They hadn’t been kidding when they said this town was small. Stoke Moran bore the name of a wealthy clan of industrialists, but they had never laid eyes on it, and it had barely even qualified as a coal camp in its heyday - now it was just a small collection of old wood-frame houses set back into the hillsides, the main road following the creek bottom. Up one little hill sat a squat, square motel that overlooked a vine-grown intersection.

On the other side of that intersection was the makeshift church - sure enough, the new incarnation of what had clearly been born as a gas station in the early part of the 20’s when cars were first becoming a must-have for the coal-town nouveau riche. Not a lot of rich left here, with or without the ‘e.’

The road was torn up by a recent influx of heavy construction machinery, the kicked-up mud and ravaged trees a testament to carelessness in the work. The top storey of an old house not unlike Sherlock’s own was barely visible through the trees.

John took all this in as Sherlock parked the hearse in the cracked parking lot. After they’d checked in, Sherlock opened the heavy curtains. He turned the bedside lamp off and on three times - barely visible in the fading daylight.

Within minutes, there was a quick, nervous knock on the door. Sherlock opened the door and Helen Stoneman scuttled in - Sherlock quickly shut the curtains. “Are you sure you weren’t followed?” he asked urgently. “You weren’t so good at seeing that before.”

“He’s at a men’s retreat in the woods until tomorrow,” she said. “Goes out with some of his faithful once in a while. They fish, they pray, they catch fresh snakes.”

Sherlock raised an eyebrow at this. “Entirely Christian and heterosexual, I’m sure.”

She giggled. “They ain’t supposed to drink but I know they do. Lord only knows what all else goes on.”

“Yes, I’m sure the Lord has seen all sorts of things a nice young lady shouldn’t,” Sherlock said, chortling. John just couldn’t resist a few little hiccups of laughter himself. For all that Sherlock claimed no interest in women, he wasn’t too bad at charming them. “But he’s been there before - he was there when you came to our house, or so you said. He still found a way to track you. He paid us a little visit, and I have to say, he wasn’t good company.”

Helen’s face went a little bit pale. “So he knows then. I figured he might. I’m glad he’s out tonight, that’s for sure.”

“He lied to you about the date,” Sherlock said. “He was testing you, to see if you suspected anything. You failed the test. You’re in more danger than you know.”

“I know we had a plan for me to signal you from the house, or the church. But there’s been some talk of doing an old-fashioned brush arbor revival. The Reverend says we need to wake people up, get the Holy Spirit moving again. Says there’s been backsliding, people going back on the Lord, people losing their fire.”

“A brush arbor?” Sherlock asked.

“Out-of-doors at night, getting people to come from all over. It makes people think of the old days, when mountain towns wouldn’t have their own preacher always and you’d get men of God riding the hills on horseback preaching the gospel to people who hadn’t barely ever heard of it before. Lot of souls got saved back then. And there weren’t a church so they’d build a sort of lean-to shelter out of trees and brush, and people would come over the hills with lanterns, singin.’” Her eyes were shining.

“Atmospheric,” Sherlock said. “Theatrical. Heightening the already intense sense of ritual. Your sect has quite the flair for drama.”

“Sounds like you got something in common with them then,” John said. “The pulpit lost a great talent when you decided to be a detective.”

“Hm, yeah, shut it, John,” Sherlock said fondly with a dismissive wave of his hand. 

Helen was shivering, though the evening was warm. It wasn’t cold she felt, it was terror.

“Then examining the house is less urgent than I thought, if this upcoming event is the night when he plans to strike. I suspect it is, that flair for drama will be irresistible. All the more effective if he can frame you in the congregation’s mind as a wayward daughter. I suspect the groundwork for that has already been laid.”

“He gets crazy and starts yelling - says I’m going to run off with the hippies,” Helen said. “We have a couple show up to the services sometimes, lookin’ in the windows and all. I think they’re just curious. One or two folks thinks we oughta try to save ‘em. Most wish they’d just go away, go back where they came from.”

“Does your stepfather have any contact with them besides his usual hellfire and brimstone and threats?” Sherlock asked.

“He says not. Do you think they had anything to do with Julia’s death?”

“Frankly no,” Sherlock said. “I think they’re a red herring. Could be useful, though. Another factor to keep an eye on, but they’re no threat. But I want you to keep an eye first and foremost on Reverend Roylott - he _is_ the threat to you. Can your bedroom door lock?”

“Yeah, but if he’s desperate to get in, it won’t stop him. It’s a flimsy old door.”

Sherlock nodded. “Don’t underestimate the danger you’re in. When a minister goes bad, he’s the worst of the worst because there is virtually nothing he can’t justify in his own mind. Every crime is sanctified and every victim deserves it.”


	5. When It's Lamplighting Time in the Valley

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sherlock and John survey Roylott's domain and his shadowy neighbors.

Helen glanced out the grimy window then, avoiding the harsh scrutiny of Sherlock’s gaze for just a moment. John could tell Sherlock had struck a nerve, but fortunately wasn’t pushing it. She really was remarkably brave, he thought. Now, as her long sleeve pulled up slightly when she bent her arm, he could see the fading bruises around her wrists, going to yellow-green.  


He could study her for other signs like a doctor probably ought to, but she hadn’t asked him for that, and a lady had her privacy. He knew enough to make him pissed as hell for her sake anyway - anything more and it might even make him sloppy.  


“The service was at your regular church the night Julia was bitten,” Sherlock said. “That’s what you told me.”  


“That’s right, sir, and we had company, we were hosting a congregation from Kentucky, over by Leatherwood in Perry County. Just a few families. There ain’t a lot of us, you know. That’s how we got to know the Farintoshes, and their boy Arnie come to work for Rev Roylott lookin’ after his animals.”  


“And that’s how you knew to come to me,” Sherlock said, nodding. “I recall a Mrs. Farintosh and the matter of some hereditary opals? I don’t recall her being a woman of such...faith.”  


“Reckon she wasn’t at the time, but then her daughter Rachel got saved at a camp meeting and got the gift of healing and eventually won them all over. That’s who brought me to your house.”  


“Of course, I should have known. Mrs. Farintosh the Elder is, I understood, _kin_ to our Mrs. Hudson by some convoluted route of mountain genealogy I don’t care to explore further.” His expression forbade her from launching into an explanation of exactly that. “Enough irrelevancy. I’d like to see your church and your house. Is it safe?”  


She trembled, but she nodded. “As safe as it ever gets. I’ll put the word out to Arnie to keep a watch out for you just in case _he_ comes back too soon.”  


***  


So, knowing the eyes upon them weren’t all hostile, Sherlock and John began a slow, careful walk out the motel driveway and up the left-hand fork of the little intersection, where the blacktop road started to fade out to gravel as it turned sharply uphill. Though it was not late, a dusk-like haze set in as the sun sank below the mountains, and the dappled shadows in the thick second-growth forest by the roadside could be hiding any number of prying eyes.  


They didn’t have far to go before they reached a little rise where the trees parted, and they could see the house - a sturdy old wood-frame with a slate-shingle roof and asphalt siding, peeled off on one side to make room for the yellowish bare wood of new construction. John followed Sherlock’s gaze past the old outhouse, past a crumbling gray shed, over a little hill past the rusted barb-wire fence. There, a few old vans and RVs were perched on the hillside near a creek, sheltering bright tents and incongruously colorful clothes which hung on a makeshift clothesline. “I can smell the patchouli from here,” Sherlock said with a wry grin.  


A shaggy-haired face peered from a back window on a painted VW minibus.  


“Why here?” John wondered. “Why don’t they join up with some of the back-to-the-landers who’re actually growin’ stuff?”  


“There’s a good chance that Helen’s theory about drugs isn’t completely off,” Sherlock said, sniffing the air. “Though I don’t think Julia Stoneman ever had a taste. There’s got to be a reason they like the isolation here - after all, this isn’t particularly good soil for farming. It’s depleted. I think I’ve got my pretext to talk to them, anyway, should I need one. Careful - if they live out here long enough, even the softest child of privilege from the suburbs can get as trigger-happy as any feuding backwoodsman.”  


“Something in the air, or the water, I suppose,” John said, glancing to the sky and the ground.  


“Nonsense,” Sherlock said. “It’s a reasonable adaptation to a potentially dangerous environment. It’s not as if calling the police would ever do them any good.”  


“I love it when you explain my own people to me,” John said.  


“Really?”  


“Nah.”  


Sherlock chuckled, but there was something wary in his face. “I don’t think these are really your people in that sense. But perhaps in another.” His eyes, now grey and cool, swept the tufted grass. “Look - there is foot traffic to Roylott’s house. And from it. But not Roylott himself, I don’t think. He wouldn’t be caught dead in moccasin boots.”  


John peered a little closer at the trailer. “Huh. I might see a reason right there. That curtain in that window - that looks like—“  


“A ragged Viet Minh flag, yes, I figured you would spot that sooner rather than later,” Sherlock said. “A trophy, most likely. Souvenir. Probably not a literal statement of political position, although you never know.”  


“One of those vets that isn’t so good with people anymore,” John said. “That explains a lot.”  


“Does it explain _that?”_ Sherlock said, peering at what appeared to be a large generator connected to a locked tin shed.  


John gazed at it, feeling even more desire now to keep his distance. “Probably growing something in there they don’t want the law to see, don’t you think? Gotta make a living somehow.”  


“Mmhmm,” Sherlock said, sounding not thoroughly convinced. “Too primitive a setup for optimal light for marijuana, I think. Mushrooms are a possibility. But they’re a long way from a convenient market for it.”  


John and Sherlock crept up slowly towards the house, hoping fervently that Helen had been right about Roylott’s absence. The house looked larger close up, and peering in the windows John could see that the furniture was classier than he’d expected. Sherlock studied the dust on the windowsills, once white but now dingy with the faint grit of coal dust. Sherlock pulled a pair of gloves from his coat pocket and tested the heavy padlock on the new doors. It didn’t yield, it was shut, but John was pretty sure it was standard-made enough that Sherlock could conquer it in a few minutes if he had a mind to.  


As Sherlock rattled the lock, John peered through the windows into the darkened room. He took in rows of wooden boxes with squares of screening on top - and a quick movement, a silhouetted shape. And John was so attuned to Sherlock that he could tell by silent muscle tensing that Sherlock had seen it too. The form that took off running into the house kept announcing itself by footsteps pelting, and Sherlock launched himself towards the rear door, dragging John with him; they came around the corner in time to see a young man bolt towards the compound of hippie trailers.  


John got a quick glimpse - short reddish hair, awkward gait, white shirt and jeans - before Helen stepped out of the house quickly, a worried look on her face.  


Sherlock stopped up short, took in the scene with rapid blinks and calculating eyes. “I take it that was Arnie?” he said.  


She nodded. “You spooked him.”  


“Does he run off to his friends over there all the time?”  


“Only when Roylott ain’t watching,” Helen said. “I’d let you in here to have a look, but I know Arnie took the key. He never did like me going into the snake room, but since Julia died, I think he’d die before he’d let me get a hand on those keys.”  


“Interesting. On Roylott’s orders, do you think? Or is he worried that you might harm the snakes if you blame them for your sister’s death?”  


“I would never!” Helen gasped. “They’ve got their purpose same as any other creature, and I know Arnie dotes on ‘em.”  


John had been dithering on whether or not to say this, but he finally blurted, “Or maybe he just doesn’t want you gettin’ bit outside of church?”  


“That’s my John, always ready with the obvious,” Sherlock said. Then he turned to Helen and fixed her with a chilling stare. “Are all the snakes here? Is he the only one who has access to them besides Roylott?”  


“As far as I know,” she said.  


Sherlock seemed to think for a moment, stock-still and blinking. “Mm,” he said. “John, we’re done here for now. Helen, lock your bedroom door just in case. But I’m certain you’re meant to die tomorrow, not tonight.”  


With that he turned and headed back down the hill towards the gravel road.  


“Mr. Holmes?” Helen called out to him. He didn’t answer.  


John looked at her for a moment, not sure what to say. “I’m sure he’s right. Just - don’t provoke Roylott, if he comes back. You know where we are. You need anything, you don’t even wait, you come get us, ok?”  


She sighed, watching Sherlock’s back disappear into the twilight. “Do you pray?”  


He nodded, stoically. “Yeah. Sometimes. Not a big fan of churches - no offense. But I-” he sniffed a little, nervously. “I still believe. Want to believe. That there’s someone up there, lookin’ out. That there’s a reason. You know?”  


“I know,” she said. “Pray for me then, please, if you don’t mind.”  


“I will,” John said. He wasn’t lying, but he averted her eyes anyway before he ran after Sherlock towards the motel.  


.


	6. Trust Not in Physicians For Trusting Is Sin

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> John is not going to like Sherlock's plan - what he knows of it at least. (What he doesn't know, he'd like even less.)

“So. Let’s talk about what we know. Julia was bitten in the church, and died at home shortly afterward, in terrible agony. You don’t think her symptoms sound like a typical rattlesnake bite, and neither do I. Yet no one could prove foul play - not least because of this sect’s prohibition against doctors. It’s the perfect crime, if it was a crime at all.”

“You’re pretty sure it was,” John said.

“Of course, all the more so now. Questions remain - how could Roylott have been certain that Julia would be bitten? It might seem inevitable, but many practitioners go decades without a bite. And how could he be sure she would die when she did? Healthy young adults survive bites from the local vipers all the time. Even members of this sect who don’t see doctors do - oh, they might be horribly scarred and lose use of a limb, but death still isn’t guaranteed.”

“What did the house tell you? And the grounds?” John asked. “I know damn well you saw stuff you aren’t telling me about because you always do, but I need something to go on. What’s your plan?”

Sherlock sighed and squirmed down into the uncomfortable-looking chair by the window.

John leaned against the wall by the dead-bolted door, for his own part avoiding the window  
This wasn’t one of the old-fashioned coal-boom hotels from early in the century, this was a 1950s cash-grab in concrete and neon - but the general miasma of coal dust and neglect made it seem nearly as ancient. These newer places didn’t age so well, he thought. The walls already showed mildew and the windows were grimy and the mattress unspeakable.

The loud whistle and long racket-racket-racket of a coal train going by shook the walls, doubtless the cause of those cracks in the ceiling.

The bathroom window was the one that afforded a view of the little road that led to Roylott’s unhomely home and unchurchly church. John could see the deep ruts that the backhoes and tractors had made as they worked their way up the muddy little holler to do their mysterious repair work.

“If it weren’t for this brush arbor development, I’d have made sure to examine the old station a lot more thoroughly,” Sherlock said, more to himself than to John. “And If we had more time when we could trust for certain that Roylott won’t be sly and come back early, I’d definitely want a closer look at those snakes.” He clenched and unclenched a fist in frustration.

“Do you think there’s a chance he’d come back early and do something bad to Helen tonight?” John asked.

“Possible but unlikely,” Sherlock said, fidgeting. “He’s the type who’s likely to go back to the same MO that was successful before. We already know that Helen doesn’t handle the snakes out of church, and Arnie at least might raise questions if it were to happen in the house. Why commit a murder in isolation where it’s harder to make it look like an accident…or the result of a risk willingly taken…when he can indulge his sense of drama and have a whole congregation full of witnesses who will testify that he _wasn’t_ to blame, if it even came close to a court case at all? Possibly even convince himself his act was sanctified in some warped way? No, no, it’ll happen at the service. I’m nearly positive. We have to be there, and ready to make our move.”

“But he’s seen us,” John said. “He knows who we are. We’re not getting into his service. These groups are tiny, they know who everyone is, they don’t like outsiders. Even you can’t disguise yourself enough, can you?”’

“A brush arbor is a big event, isn’t it? There’ll be people from all over - well, all over the network of Holiness religion anyway — and the outdoor setting is going to make it harder for Roylott’s thugs to keep attendance under control.”

“Wow, that really is old-time,” John said, chuckling. “I haven’t seen one of those since I was little. They’re gonna build that lean-to thing and everything?”

“So I’m told,” Sherlock said. “A quaint custom. Almost romantic. It’s especially easy to feel primitive and persecuted out in the woods in the darkness. I’m not surprised this flavor of faith has more imminent appeal to the lower classes than the white-washed middle-class churching where everyone sits quietly in their seats. Theatrical ritual and intense emotional manipulation. Tried and true and terribly effective.”

“Patronizing as it is, your sympathy for these people is starting to worry me,” John said quietly.

“Not _starting,_ it’s been worrying you for a while. Anyway, the setting favors us - even if Roylott recognizes us in disguise, we’ll be well ensconced and it’ll be harder to eject us without causing a scene, particularly if we play along.”

“I don’t want to play along,” John said. “I’ve told you and told you, I cannot stand by and watch people do themselves in!”

“Then Roylott will find a way to do Helen in away from us if we’re not there to keep an eye on things! She is the one we’re here to help!”

“I’m a lot less sanguine than you are about Roylott not being willing to put up a fight,” John said. “You saw him. And I’ve seen that kind of preacher before. The congregation does what he wants. All they gotta do is paint us as sinners - which ain’t a hell of a reach - and we’re getting kicked out with the shit kicked out of us. You’re thinking of polite Methodists again. This ain’t that.”

 

“Well, it’s for the best we don’t do anything to agitate him until it’s unavoidable then,” Sherlock said crisply.

“And use Helen as bait,” John said, trying to keep calm. “I can’t do this, Sherlock. I can’t stand by and watch people poison themselves and not do a damn thing about it!”

“Don’t even tell anyone you’re a doctor,” Sherlock snapped. “They’re not well-liked around here, doctors. It’s hard enough to get any of them to even see one if they break their leg doing yard work, they certainly won’t allow it for a worship-related injury.”

“They just pray, is that it? Faith healing? Laying on of hands?”

“I thought _you_ were the one in favor of respecting people’s fairy tales,” Sherlock sneered. “But only up to a point. Apparently some kinds of make-believe are more acceptable to you than others.”

“My tolerance stops when people get hurt who don’t have to. When people die when they could be saved.”

“You do value the body over the soul, then? That’s how they’d see it.”

“I cain’t fucking believe I’m havin’ this argument about religion with _you_ of all people,” John barked. “I don’t believe in havin’ to choose between the body and the soul. A person needs both to live. And I don’t think you ought to tempt fate. Don’t test God.” Sherlock started to say something, and John cut him off. “Don’t say it.”

“You haven’t really been paying attention if you think that’s what it’s about for them,” Sherlock said, and John found that so surprising he had to change his whole tack of argument. Flummoxed, he just fell quiet for a while.

“Ecstasy. Altered chemistry in the brain.” Sherlock paced the small room, seeming to be talking as much to himself as to John. “I’ve pursued it, and captured it. I’ve altered my own consciousness with drugs, with sex, with music, with meditation, with deduction and memory techniques, with physical exercise and sleep deprivation. The human mind has a remarkable capacity to engage itself in trance states. What they do here is closer to the fakirs and fire walkers of India or the dancing initiates inviting possession by the Loa in Haitian voodoo than it is to more genteel and middle-class Christian church behavior.”

“I still can’t believe you’re defending this. You, Mr. Rational Atheist. You think it’s fine and dandy for people to drink strychnine and dance around with rattlesnakes because they say it’s in the Bible.”

“I think it’s fine and dandy for them to do that because they choose to do it and for no other reason,” Sherlock said. “The Bible doesn’t have any relevance to me, but fascinating human customs remain fascinating nonetheless. It’s idiotic, but then, there have been times when I’ve voluntarily injected nearly enough heroin to kill me, and that’s objectively idiotic too. And you joined the Army of your own free will during wartime. Clearly, self-preservation isn’t always the top priority for any of us.”

“You are sayin’ this. You who get so cruel, so judgmental over lots more common kinds of stupid…”

“That’s precisely why, John. Currently I’m finding this particular flavor of stupidity to be interesting for once. That’s all I ask, really.”

“They’re still people, not zoo animals,” John said, clenching his hands at his sides.

“They’re people who, I believe, have a murderer among them. My job is to prove that. The way to do that is to observe without interfering, without giving them any more reason to be suspicious of us than they already are. You don’t need to pretend to believe.”

“But you’re going to pretend to believe? I hope you’re not. They won’t ever believe you could be one of them. Are you gonna try it?” John felt the situation spiraling out of control. Every time he thought Sherlock was done pushing ethical limits, he found whole new frontiers. 

“I may have to simulate spontaneity. I reserve the right.”

“Jesus, Sherlock.”

“I was brought here to find out who killed Julia Stoneman. I _know_ who killed Julia Stoneman. I need to find out how and I need to find a way to prove it in time to keep Reverend Roylott from killing Helen as well. That’s why we’re here, not to change anyone’s non-murdering lifestyle.”

“And you really do expect me to stand by and watch and do nothing if someone drinks poison or gets snakebit right in front of me. I’m a doctor, Sherlock. I took a fucking oath. At the rescue squad we get poison and snakebite all the damn time and we don’t just stand there and sing fucking hymns.”

“You’re looking at the bizarre faith performance as if _that_ is the problem we’re here to solve. It isn’t. Cult practices follow a well-entrenched pattern of confirmation bias and group reinforcement, including hostility to outsiders and defensiveness about belief challenges. In fact the presence of challenges to the belief and of outsiders said to be hostile is very important to the development of cult unity. Knowing that, I know I have to work _within_ their system without appearing to contradict it. But if someone does get bitten, I suggest you attempt a laying-on of hands, that’s one of the signs.”

 _Give me strength,_ John mouthed silently, gazing up to heaven - or to the waterstained ceiling.

“Possible,” Sherlock finally admitted, grudgingly. “It’s possible that you’re right. I know I can count on you to have both my back and your own, but causing extra casualties is defeating the purpose.”


	7. Why Should I Fear the Darkest Hour

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What can slither through in the dark crevices of a temporary rift between partners? Sherlock and John's ethical argument might leave them separated and vulnerable at the most dangerous time.

They passed a tense night in the motel room, hearing each others’ breath in the darkness and scanning the silent road for any sign of life. If John had been inclined to make a move on Sherlock before, even just to touch his hand, anger had killed his desire for the time being. Sherlock didn’t seem to care - he was at his most rigid and distant, every slight ruffle and sigh seeming to express faint annoyance at John’s existence. From time to time, his cigarette smoke cut through the faint reek of Comet cleaner and coal soot and mildew. He didn’t offer and John didn’t ask.

John fell into resentful sleep still fully-dressed, slumped sideways against the headboard. Sherlock didn’t seem to move. The phone didn’t ring. John stirred for a moment to see Sherlock’s long fingers pulling the curtain open just a tick to show a pickup truck pulling a small camper, crunching the gravel of the road and turning up the hill just as the woods turned gray with dawn.

Roylott’s return.

John felt Sherlock tense tighter even from their distance - how aware he was still of every change and motion of that man’s body and his moods, though he said nothing. It wasn’t right, what Sherlock assumed he’d be willing to do. He closed his eyes and turned over in the bed, away from the window, willing himself back to sleep.

He woke later than he’d meant to. This town was set deeper down in a steep valley than Sherlock’s house on the hill, and it was well into the day when the sun showed its face above the ridgetop enough to wake him.

 

Sherlock was gone. No note, no nothin’, just all their clothes lying strewn around the room like a hurricane had hit it. John gave an angry kick to Sherlock’s unnecessary pile of shirts and hustled up his own few things into his old Army duffle. Ready to move out when needed.

John stared around the room, as if hoping Sherlock would suddenly appear, and then felt relieved that he didn’t. He checked for the room key still in his jacket pocket, and then he took a long, resentful shower.

He dressed and then locked up the room to wander to the nearest still-functioning gas station a half mile away, where he bought a Coke and a shitty little sausage biscuit.

The service would happen at dusk, so he had a few hours to decide if he still wanted to be in the vicinity.

***

Just how far would Sherlock, self-proclaimed Master of Disguise, go, John wondered. Would he be able to put on that starched-up polyester look that the menfolk of the church had? Could he learn that speaking style, that easy natural repetition of key phrases in high King James diction? (Only the King James was the real Word of God to them, any other edition was counterfeit, cheap, braying as the voices of donkeys.)

John was trying not to think about the nightmare he’d woken up from - it was blurry and unfocused in his mind still, but his hands shook as he poured non-dairy creamer powdermilk in his cheap but free motel coffee, that pop alone wasn’t cuttin’ it. He saw hands swollen and blackened - his own and Sherlock’s, hand in hand. He’d seen Sherlock faking it - was he faking it? Oh, he had to be - spinning and singing with his arms wreathed in snakes, that deep rich voice speaking in tongues, and then the fangs of monster rattlers in his wrists, his throat, biting him again and again.

It was an appalling thought to be having, but a big part of John was really starting to wish he could get back to the times when he woke up screaming from dreams about his _own_ death. Sherlock’s was always so much worse, especially when John had to watch and couldn’t do a damn thing to save him. Snake bite was a new one - convulsions, cold sweat, blood in Sherlock’s lovely mouth when he bit his own tongue in his agony, and over it, the congregation just kept on singing and swaying and muttering and spinning chaotically, wrapped up in the terror and ecstasy of their own trance and counting on God to know his own.

The old folks used to say that when you dreamt about a snake it meant your own death, but John kept up a healthy skepticism for those things. Didn’t keep the chillbumps off his arms though, because he couldn’t shake that sense that someone was about to die. Well, he could name three people he was bound to make sure weren’t.

Sacred duty. Still, he couldn’t help getting more and more steamed about being taken for granted. He paced the room. He tried to turn on the TV, and the rabbit-ear antenna with the tin-foil on it fell right off. Snowy signal showing some _Bonanza_ rerun.

He _could_ leave. His own home and a day or two of freedom from Sherlock’s presence was sounding awfully good. The things Sherlock presumed that John would be willing to do--

He sighed. That house he thought of as home wasn’t really his own, was it?

He looked at his duffle in the corner. _Yeah, Watson,_ he thought. _You came back to the world with pretty much nothing but that. Ain’t you used to having more now, though?_

Well, he was going to have to pay the motel for another goddamn night anyway if he didn’t want Sherlock’s things thrown out in the road. The hearse wasn't even there to stash them in. Grumbling the whole way down he gave the gum-cracking lady at the counter some money, knowing at least he was keeping his options open if he decided to fuck it all and throw himself on the mercy of his legs and his thumb and some northbound trucker on the highway before all was said and done.

He’d think better outside in the fresh air. It was getting on dusk, and the service would start before long. He left everything behind but a flashlight and cigarettes and his ad-hoc medic kit, which currently included his Smith & Wesson.

John stormed away from the motel to the brush arbor, dimming his flashlight to its lowest setting to make it harder for Sherlock - or anyone else- to track him. The night was still with only a thin breeze rustling the leaves, and the oppressive high drone of peepers and trill of the whip-poor-wills.

Sick to his stomach with disgust and worry, he stopped for a moment at the edge of the trees on the hill where the brush arbor was nearly all built. He watched the last branches added to the wooden framework. All these years in, it didn’t sit right with him to abandon Sherlock to danger. And yet Sherlock had made it so clear John’s help wasn’t welcome or needed, the very moment John tried to set himself a limit of something he couldn’t take. And what was John supposed to do then? Find the hearse, steal it and drive back to Arthel County and leave Sherlock to hitch-hike home after he’d infiltrated the snake cult? Sherlock knew perfectly well John wouldn’t do that.

John really might not be above putting out his thumb himself, though. Or making a phone call or two in the morning after spending another restless bitter night in the old motel, or maybe even in the woods.

Down below in the valley, the hymns were starting. The hairs on John’s arms and the back of his neck rose, goosebumps rising on his skin. It was an instinctive reaction for a mountain boy, involuntary as a blink at a speck of dust in the eye. He knew these songs, and they knew him. He knew those voices, high and sharp and stern and pleading, unschooled and austere.

What could he do? The lanterns were coming on. John saw people swaying and praying in the beams of flashlights and electric generator spotlights on the preacher, and a building bonfire. They do all the signs, and some more besides, he thought. They handle fire too, someone will think they have the Holy Ghost and put their hands in the coals.

From his vantage point, John realized if he let his eyes adjust and just watch, he could see things below fairly well. He hid himself back in the kudzu and honeysuckle, and let the watery moon do its work. 

They kept filing in, singing. “Send down the rain, Lord, send down the rain, send down the latter rain.” The Holy Ghost rain, the blessing of Pentecost.

There were boxes with hinged-screen tops all around the altar, and John knew what was in them. He saw a man mixing up water bottles and mason jars with spoonfuls of crystal powder, and he knew what that was too. Adrenaline made his hand twitch, and he had to hold still and remember his breathing exercises from that little book about meditation that Ralph from Boston had given him before getting turned into a puddle of death.

He saw two worn-down looking women wheeling in an old man with an oxygen tank, near to death. He saw a young woman stagger in, shaking her hands wildly and pulling at her hair in fear. He saw solid, normal-looking middle-aged couples come in, faces full of anticipation.

He saw Helen Stoneman walking in calmly and sitting down near the front, and he saw her try hard not to glance at a young man helping to build up the fire.

The dim lights made all their faces uncanny, and the only bright light shone on the altar, where a small band was setting up.

John scanned the crowd and was startled to see a few of the hippies from the camp over the hill lurking cautiously on the edges of the little field of folding chairs being set up, one of them nudging out of the way as the dying old man and his retinue took their seats.

His trained eyes assessed threats - Roylott, certainly, and his church brothers at his side helping him prepare the deadly things for the entranced believers to demonstrate their faith to the death. Experience taught him that churchmen this fervent were likely to have a bad past buried beneath a few rounds of redemption and atonement and always lurking near the surface ready to bubble up again. Demons don’t stay cast out. John was sure that some of them had past sins of a violent nature. One of them at least was definitely a fellow Nam vet. Something to watch. The women weren’t exempt from reasonable caution either.

And he couldn’t be sure what Sherlock had planned, and now he cursed himself for not asking right and for arguing instead of listening. Was Sherlock also lurking in the trees on the edge of the gathering, observing, waiting to spring? Was he going to saunter in and confront Roylott mid-sermon, probably get himself exorcised painfully at best? Was he going to try to be more discreet? John eyed the hippie contingent closely. He was sure some of them were Sherlock’s spies now - his trick of winning the dropouts’ and misfits’ loyalty with a little bit of respect, some dope money, and a chance to participate in something resembling justice would work just as well here as in Arthel County. Hell, he wouldn’t put it past Sherlock to disguise himself up and try to blend in with them - he was more likely to pass there.

John was still angry, but he was a little surprised at himself for even having considered walking away just as things were about to get exciting. _You’re a hypocrite, Doctor Watson,_ he told himself. _You swore that oath but you love the mayhem too._

_Watch yourself, Watson. This isn’t there. You’re not in country. You’re here. You’ve been back in the world for years, don’t lose it now._

He didn’t see any sign of Sherlock in the gathering below, and he wasn’t sure how he ought to respond to that. But he was more glad than ever that he hadn’t bailed out of town after all, because Helen was there, and she looked pale and shaking in the kerosene lights. At least someone was here to witness for her, and step in if there was help needed.


	8. The Hour Is Come and the Feast Is Nigh

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Even a bad shepherd can't keep the Holy Ghost from his flock. "But now for the present I'll drink / The bitter cup for you." Roylott’s wicked plan is beginning to come to a head. But there are other forces at work, seen and unseen.

John leaned in with his ear as a rough choir teased out every plaintive and joyful note.

“When Christ cometh descending from Heaven / on a cloud like he said in his word / I’ll be joyfully carried to meet him / on the wings of the great speckled bird.” 

Women raised their hands to the skies. Some of the hippies were doing a sort of jerky, flailing dance like they were at a Grateful Dead concert, and the plain-dressed old-timers kept giving them odd looks but maybe not quite so disapproving as they’d been an hour or two earlier. 

This could go on all night.

The singing rose to a peak, the clapping of hands, the jangling of tambourines, and the guitar player was laying down some surprisingly good bluesy slide. John’s fingertips danced on his denim-clad thighs where he watched from the hillside, leaning up against a tree. 

The first of the speakers, a man in his 30s, took the mic while still chanting a hymn. “Gonna get the Lord to move! He’s a-movin,’ can you feel it? He’s a movin’! When he moves upon you, you can’t get him off you! Can’t get out from under it! And you don’t want to, brothers and sisters, do you! Get that spirit in you! Stand up if He calls you to! Get on your knees if He calls you to! Give yourself up to the Lord!”

He still chanted to the rhythm of the music. The crowd at least was moving. All were on their feet who could stand, hollerin’ back, Amen-ing and Hallelujah’ing.”

John was glad he couldn’t see most of their faces - the shining, unfocused eyes, the tears and crumpled faces. Hands reached up to heaven. It was starting to work on John even from a distance - oh the churches of his childhood didn’t have snakes for sure, but even so sometimes people got a little passionate, and he’d be lying if he said there wasn’t a part of him that missed it.

He gave a full-body shiver as Brother Roylott appeared, clapping his big hands and moving up to the port-a-pulpit, looking like one good faith-driven pound of his fist could shatter the brittle wood.

John tried not to flinch as Roylott’s chanting, incantational bellow seemed to fill the little holler and animate the small crowd around him into a further frenzy.

“Do you feel the anointing, brothers and sisters? Do you feel the hand of God? Do you hear the voice of God? Do you feel Him pick you up and move you where He wants you? Feel Him bring your soul to the light and your hands to the snake?”

His voice was raw and commanding. John shivered to think how he might have come to this place if he hadn’t already seen this man’s true nature. How it was not unthinkable that he himself could fall under the spell.

“People say it is a crazy thing, to take up a serpent. Ain’t no big thing, to pick up a snake. Anyone can do it. The fornicator...the adulterer...the blasphemer...the homosexual….they can pick up a snake. The rebellious woman can pick up a snake. And maybe hit’ll bite and maybe hit won’t. That ain’t the same thing...as to take up a serpent when you’re in the Word of God!”

Shouts and cries from the rapturous crowd. 

“The Lord knows His own! The Lord separates the sheep from the goats! It is not the courage of a man that brings victory over the Devil! It is the Word of God! It is the blood of Jesus Christ our only Savior! It is to snatch victory from the very jaws of death! Because we die, brothers and sisters. This life, this vale of tears, this evil world, is but the blink of an eye in the Lord’s eternity! Will you live long years in this world and never know the joy of God, and then drink the bitter draft of eternal death in Hell? Or will you stay strong in the faith? Will you put your eternal life in the hands of the Lord? Will you let Him call you home when He willeth it? Will you let the serpent bite through your skin and feed on your sin, and then rise up singin’ to meet Judgment?”

A lady in the right aisle swooned, and the frenzied dancers swirled around her as she twitched on the ground in what sure as hell looked to John like some kind of seizure. He choked down every instinct he had with a taste of bitter bile, and breathed relief when she rose up on her knees, speaking in tongues and breathing hard - but breathing, that was the important thing.

Roylott paused a moment and glanced upward, clenching his meaty fist and then raising his hands as the spirit took him over again.

“And the Lord placed the signs, and the Lord and His followers went forward, and the faithful follow the signs, the signs following them that believe in the FULL Gospel! Them that believe in the Lord shall know the joy! Them that believe shall be uplifted! Shall be washed in the Blood! Shall shelter in the Name! And the sinner man shall run to the rock! To the sea! To the grave that will not hold him! Drive that devil down! Drive him out! Nowhere to run! Nowhere to hide! The Lord sees all! Sees your heart! Sees your soul! Sends the anointing!”

John still saw no sign of Sherlock, and he wasn’t sure if that was anything to be worried about - perhaps Sherlock was watching from a safe spot of his own, perhaps some plan of his was unfolding unseen - or perhaps something terrible had already happened to him. This isn’t right, John thought, even as his own skin began to tingle with something that might have been fear and might have been the instinctual goosebumps of the power of Scripture wielded by a man he knew to be evil.

The moments John dreaded were beginning to happen. A young man from the back of the crowd came forward, hands uplifting, oddly chanting in syllables that made no sense. He moved with a strange, jerky shambling step, eyes fixed on heaven, and no one made move to stop him as he reached for the metal fire pit and took a handful of burning coals, holding it up to the sky in his bare hands, shouting ‘praise God,’ and the congregation only affirmed this, yelling ‘amen’ as he walked back to his spot in the darkness, trailing embers.

More and more they started to move out of the shadows and into the altar light, entranced, hands outstretched, some spinning. A young man let out a cry and fell to the ground where he sobbed on his knees. An elderly woman whirled and whirled, limp arms spinning, until she too fell down.

 _This ain’t right,_ every instinct in John screamed. _These people are sincere. Their faith is real. It ain’t right for him to use them this way, Lord. Please deliver them from evil, Lord._ He was a little surprised to catch himself praying like that, but it was a reflex as undeniable as kicking out when a doctor taps below the kneecap.

The large. grim-faced man who stood beside Roylott began to sway, and in the dim shifting light it seemed to John as if his hideous, terrifying mug split open in a transcendent expression of radiant joy. He raised his hairy arms to the sky and reached for the nearest wooden box. The creature he drew out was a medium-sized eastern rattler, drowsy and unaggressive. The man seemed to almost croon to it as he cradled it in two hands and slowly raised it above his head. A woman came forward singing and she took another snake out of the boxes, this one a pale copperhead, and danced with it like she would waltz with a loving partner.

It wasn’t quite the frenzy John had expected - the snake dancers moved carefully, letting the thick-muscled ropy bodies slide through their hands and wrap around their arms and their necks as they hummed praises to God. The snakes frankly looked bored. The evening was cool enough to possibly make them sluggish, but John figured they were probably just used to it by now. Trained and tame, maybe. He knew they were wild-caught but he didn’t know how long the church-men had kept them.

Safest now to keep his eyes fixed on Miss Helen Stoneman, who sat near the front of the section swaying slightly in her seat, occasionally lifting a hand and holding it above her head. She seemed reserved, and she often dropped her head seemingly deep in prayer, but maybe just as likely to be avoiding the piercing, commanding gaze of Roylott. What must it be like to have to live with a man like that?

The young women with her rose from their chairs. One of them, with the darkest hair, started to slowly twirl. Another, a slightly plumper one, made straight for the altar.

Then Helen rose up, and stiff-limbed and uncertain, she headed for the altar too, her every move tracked. She came up the aisle and paused for a moment by the old man with the oxygen tank, probably three-quarters dead from the black lung, and she started to sing as she laid her hands on him in the gesture of healing, and the women around her began to loudly pray. Seemingly confident that his faith healing would continue on without, she drifted back towards the altar, barely breathing, gliding like a ghost.

John’s body tensed instinctively. _If you’ve got a plan, Sherlock, seems like now would be the time._ He could only trust to hope that Sherlock was also somewhere in the bushes watching closely as Helen Stoneman reached out for the snake box, moving with an unnatural slowness as if hypnotized. Maybe she was. For a moment she gazed at the jars of strychnine water. She passed them by with a lingering look and reached instead for the biggest rattlesnake she could find. It seemed heavy as it draped itself around her shoulders, and she swayed with a wordless song, an evocation of an emotion that was not easily expressed.

There was something holy and primeval about the way she moved. She could be a Greek oracle or a Voodoo priestess or an Egyptian queen. There was something universal about the grace and alienness of snakes and the desire to dance with death. John remembered the temple carvings of the jeweled, regal Nagas he’d seen back in Vietnam and Thailand, the sacred-serpent water spirits more ancient than any religion with a human-form god, both protective and dangerous.

The big rattler seemed unfazed by Helen’s slow dance and her prayer, and maybe one snake wasn’t enough when you got that deep in the Holy Spirit, because Helen twirled back close to the snake box on the altar and eyed some of the other offerings.

So much was happening at once - the worshippers hooting and hollering, the guitar player losing all sense of melody and just working his slide up and down in a weirdly sexual way, conjuring forth high lonesome wailing, hands laid on the sick - and Brother Roylott glancing at one of his henchmen with a nod, as a devious-looking man gently guided Helen’s hand to take up a different serpent, the smallest and slimmest copperhead of all. John didn’t think it looked particularly imposing.

There was a shout from the crowd, cries of “Praise the Lord” as the lung-sick old miner rose from his chair, pulling the oxygen tubes from his nose and tossing his cane aside. He stood up straight and breathed clear, miraculously. He raised his hands like a supplicant and muttered strange syllables, some kind of incoherent personal language, lost in trance. He was taller than John had expected and he moved like a much younger man, one who had never been near death’s door.

“DO NOT TOUCH THAT SNAKE,” he cried with a deep, unshaking voice. The crowd seemed to gasp as one, those who were alert to what was happening and not off in their own inarticulate dance with the Holy Ghost. The man moved quickly, and Roylott was almost as quick. The old man tried to place himself between the snake and Helen, and instead Roylott grasped him by the neck and held the serpent near his throat. As Roylott tried to force him forward to receive the poison bite, the latex bald-headpiece and wrinkle-prosthetics started to rip from the old man’s head, revealing dark curls beneath.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> While you're stewing over that cliffhanger, have some real-life documentation of Appalachian Pentecostal services. Here's the fantastic 1967 documentary Holy Ghost People - filmed in Scrabble Creek, WV, which is very much exactly like the kind of town we're in here. Warning for some disturbing content - a pastor is bitten by a snake onscreen and there's blood and swelling (he later died). Some more interesting facts about this film: filmmaker Peter Adair was gay and best known for the groundbreaking 1977 documentary _Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives._ He died of complications from AIDS in 1996 at the age of 53. Minimalist composer Steve Reich was on the sound recording team.
> 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZIa4kutkIM
> 
>  
> 
> No snakes here, but this one was filmed in my home county, in the little town where my intermediate and high schools were, sometime in the 70s. I think I recognize some people! The preacher is more a travelling pro than a local.
> 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IviOGt68ipk


	9. Rescue the Perishing, Care for the Dying

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Conflicting plans come to a head - specifically, the heads of Chekhov's rattlesnakes.

Of course Sherlock had a plan, John sighed, running out from the woods, no longer caring who saw him now. And of course it involved putting himself in the center of danger. 

Sherlock twisted and tried to get away, but Roylott was strong, and Sherlock should have known that. From his vantage point John could see that Sherlock’s eyes were fixed upon the snake that was all too close to him. 

“Do you feel the anointing, daughter?” Roylott growled to Helen. “Do you feel it? Are you there for me to cast this demon out? Are you ready to go home tonight, Helen? Are you ready to face your God? You brought this devil into our midst, Jezebel. Do you repent?” She started to back away, now apparently aware enough to start to fear for her own earthly safety.

Roylott’s henchmen advanced upon her. One had a snake in his hand. The other the glass of strychnine. “Do you feel the anointing, Helen?” Roylott repeated with a grotesque little smile. “Are you in the Spirit? Are you in the Word? Will the Holy Ghost protect you? Or are you out here alone in your worldly pride, bringing in spies to rat out your church?”

John knew he should be focused on her, their client and the one who’d begged their protection, but all he could see was Sherlock in Roylott’s grip with the snake so near him. A bite on a limb he’d likely survive, but the snake’s head nodded dangerously close to the major blood vessels of his neck. John considered that pretty much the equivalent of gunpoint, or at least it wasn’t a risk he was ready to take.

John watched horrified as Sherlock reached out, his free hand venturing toward the snake box. “I’m not afraid of the serpents, Reverend Roylott,” he said. A big gray-and-black timber rattler accepted his invitation and nosed at his hand. Sherlock took it up, gently, let it wrap itself around his arm.

For all that John’s world had frozen down to a very few people, the rest of the service still went on around them — singing, clapping and whirling. Only the eye of the storm was deadly still. Roylott’s man dragged Helen around beside Sherlock, closer. 

“Sharper than a serpent’s tooth, an ungrateful child, they say,” Roylott crooned. “Is that the truth? How much sharper? Ungrateful child is about to find out. That’s my favorite snake right here, the little one, and she’s got enough bite for the both of you. Better say your prayers. Helen at least knows how to pray. She has a chance she might not see Hell tonight. Can’t say the same for you, Holmes. Holmes the home wrecker, Holmes the homo, you’re going to meet the Devil real soon.”

“I think I already have,” Sherlock said. He reached out with the hand wrapped in rattlesnake, hearing its deadly dry warning. Almost gently he petted the head of the snake held close to his throat. He could scarcely dare to swallow.

Helen was sobbing in terror as she reached out for the snake. 

Instinct drove John to sidle in slow and quiet, sticking to the shadows of the flickering kerosene lights.

There was a young man with a sweet face looking on in horror from the opposite side of the altar, and John thought he saw a sympathy in him, and realized he was the one who had run from the snake shed when Sherlock had startled him. He kept looking from the snake to Helen, and John could tell he was about to run forward in terrified love.

So, John realized with a Sherlock-like insight. Her friend’s brother. Not so simple that Helen couldn’t love him.

_Calm, calm, calm,_ John tried to send him the message telepathically. Oh, what he would do to make the power of prayer true and real in that moment. Or to have a decent sniper rifle to hand, that would be even better. He could almost smell the elephant grass and the silence, waiting for the long-range shot.

Wouldn’t do much about that snake, though. That wouldn’t be where John would be aiming.

Sherlock moved slowly, very slowly, his arm wrapped in rattlesnake moving up incrementally, each inch a dozen heartbeats. At last he made a loud hissing noise, distracting, as the two snakes’ heads met and they engaged each other, to a quick hiss of mutual dislike.

Each snake jerked suddenly, furious and defensive. In a split-second, multiple things happened: The small snake in Roylott’s hand snapped its head away from Sherlock and back to its master, angrily. It was Roylott that it struck at — once, twice, three times. Rapt in horror and frozen, Sherlock flinched. 

And then Sherlock’s rattler bit him on his arm; he cried out and dropped it, and it bit his ankle as it slithered away. Horrified, the snake-tamer boy raced to catch it, calming it even as Sherlock stared in horror at his two pairs of puncture wounds.

But nothing he was experiencing was anything like what was happening to Reverend Roylott.

The little snake slithered quickly away, only pausing for a moment at a saucer of milk that had been laid out for it. It investigated, then threaded its head away in disdain and headed for freedom. Arnie tried to catch that one too, but it was gone into the weeds so quickly he hadn’t had a prayer, and frankly John was glad to see it go.

John ran forward with everything in his kit.

He supposed he was being hypocritical by stepping quickly over Roylott’s convulsing, spasming, frothing body to attend to Sherlock, who looked more startled and offended than in pain - at the moment, that would change, and soon, and badly — as he slumped down calmly to sit on the floor and let John do his work. 

Snakebite kit. Twice now. _Hold out your wrist, Sherlock._ Tiny x-shaped scalpel incisions, suction with the rubber cup to draw the venom out. Sherlock held still, but he wasn’t quite so stoic now — he had gone pale and shaking, and sweat prickled on his face. John repeated the process on his ankle as Sherlock closed his eyes and kept his breathing as steady as he could. “Try to stay calm,” John said, holding up his hand, gently petting Sherlock’s leg to soothe him and stop the spasms. Symptoms of oncoming shock were unmistakable. “Try to keep your pulse as normal as you can.” 

Inspiration struck John as he saw the fire coals and the saucer of milk. It was crazy, it was ridiculous, but at least it was a reassuring kind of crazy — he could almost hear Mrs. Hudson’s voice in his head squawking orders. He still had the little bag she had given him, and remembered what she had told him to do with it. Quickly he put the milk on the coals to heat up and went back to Sherlock.

Helen was frozen in between Sherlock and her stepfather, staring at Roylott in horror as the preacher convulsed, his face frozen in a rictus of terror and a steady foam of nonsense syllables coming from his mouth. The man’s bitten hand had turned black and his fingers pulled into a bloody fist, and his head beat horribly against the ground with every groaning lurch. He started to shout in raw animal terror. Some of the congregation had gathered around him to chant and pray.

Helen backed up, she thought, she considered — and she laid her hands instead on Sherlock’s shoulders, singing softly, her eyes closed in prayer.

John took the hot milk from the fire pit and laid Mrs. Hudson’s gift in it — a mad-stone, she’d called it, taken from the stomach of a deer. Good to use for getting bit by mad dogs or poison snakes. Drew the poison out, helped to heal.

John gave Roylott a last contemptuous look. His doctor’s oath was screaming in his ear about triage, because of the two snakebit men it was pretty clear who was closest to death. But then, over there John wouldn’t have been expected to abandon a buddy to tend to the enemy. Half-laughing at his own silliness, John knelt by Sherlock and pressed the madstone to his wounds — first his beautiful, fair wrist, now bruised and discolored and swelling. As John pressed, he moved the stone aside for a moment and did what you aren’t really supposed to do; he sucked at the neat x-incisions with his mouth, and spat blood and venom out on the ground. Sherlock shivered and John pressed the stone back, giving him a steady, challenging gaze. He continued to maintain eye contact as he repeated the procedure on Sherlock’s ankle.

Sherlock was trying to keep cool, but he had to be in agonizing pain. Sweat trickled down his forehead and a thin line of drool leaked out of his mouth as he bit his lip and tried to keep from screaming. Helen still kept her hands lightly on him, praying the whole time.

“Call a doctor!” John barked at the crowd. “Call the sheriff! Call the rescue squad! Get somebody to a phone or _this_ man is going to die!” He pointed at Roylott.

Nobody moved for too long. Not calling a doctor was too ingrained, that doctrine ran deep. At last, one of the hippies near the rear of the block of folding chairs took off running towards the gas station with its pay phone.

“I can get you to the hospital faster than anyone else can,” John said, hoisting Sherlock up to lean on his shoulder. Sherlock had gone clammy and pale, and turned away from John quickly and vomited a thin stream of bile, somehow managing to do that almost gracefully. “Come on now.”

“Roylott will be dead before he can reach any medical care,” Sherlock murmured through his trails of spit, “if they even let him have any.”

“I don’t care,” John said. “I don’t think anyone else does either.”

***

Sherlock seemed to be fading in and out of consciousness when John loaded him into the passenger seat of his old hearse, which Sherlock had hidden in an overgrown fork nearby. Time for John to take the wheel. “Here, hold onto that,” John said, pressing Mrs. Hudson’s mad-stone into his hand. Sherlock made a woozy, confused noise but did as he was told.

And, cutting on the headlights, John did one of the things he’d been born to do, speeding out of the holler like a bat out of hell and forcing the tires to hug the curves of the twisted roads like passionate lovers’ hands on beloved bodies, surrendering his will to that of the mountains. Terror for Sherlock fought in the depths of his heart with a wild, primitive joy to be back on the battlefield with the precious cargo of a wounded man, racing the Reaper himself and determined to win.

He didn’t know these exact roads with his brain, but his instincts did. Even at top speed he pulled down the mike of the CB and got on Lestrade’s channel. “Silver Fox, this is Porcupine. Honeydripper’s down but I got him. Sharp sting, serpent’s tooth. Headed to the ER at Welch. Over and out.”

“Stay with me, Sherlock,” John murmured. In the flashing moonlight he could see the black swelling spreading on Sherlock’s fair forearm. “Keep it down. Lower than your heart. Don’t reach up.”

John remembered nothing else of his desperate drive. He hadn’t realized how deep into crisis mode he really was until the redoubtable nurses at the union hospital nearly had to pry his hands from Sherlock, and their sharp voices brought him back out of dissociation and into focus.

_Right. They know snakebite here. He’s in good hands. There’s no NVA trying to shoot up the field hospital. Okay to stand down._

But the taste of the terrible coffee was almost exactly the same.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I cannot stress this enough: the first aid John performs here IS what was recommended in the 1970s (although using the mouth to suck venom out has always been considered dubious). It's what I was taught, and as a kid roaming around in the woods I carried a snakebite kit with the little scalpel blade in it just like he's got. It is NOT what is recommended now. Cutting an x over the wound is no longer believed to be wise. Here is current info: https://www.mayoclinic.org/first-aid/first-aid-snake-bites/basics/art-20056681
> 
> While I have done a lot of research for this, I'm also taking liberties. I'm not trying to be hyper-realistic about snakebite or snake behavior here. I only have to be more accurate than Arthur Conan Doyle, and that's a very low bar to clear.


	10. Prepare O Sinner To Be Wise

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hospital-bound Sherlock at last gets to his second-favorite part of every case (well, maybe third favorite): dramatic exposition. He receives gifts, including a piece of John's mind.

The minimum of 48 hours Sherlock was ordered to stay in the hospital gave John enough time to make trips home and back. Sheriff Lestrade had rescued their possessions from the motel, and made a show of clucking disapprovingly at Sherlock while he took his turn standing vigil.

John thought he was doing a pretty good job of holding it together until he’d hauled an overnight bag out of the house, loaded up Sherlock’s hearse - and then saw something out of the corner of his eye, reacted instinctively, and then realized he’d put three bullets point-blank into a garden hose.

The second time, he stopped off to thank Mrs. Hudson, who had already cut Roylott’s obituary out of the Bluefield newspaper. “That was quick,” John said with no remorse. “Oh, and thanks for the you-know-what.” She wouldn’t let him leave without flowers and cornbread.  


“Bring him home soon so I can give him a whupping,” she said. “Imagine, gettin’ himself bit in church when he don’t even believe in it.” She shook her head disdainfully.

 _She might do it, too,_ John thought. _I should sell tickets._

 

The distance between Stanger and Welch wasn’t more than 30 miles as the crow flies, but the road wriggled close along the creek bed, adding another 25 or so as it meandered through the wrinkled landscape. Gave John a little too much time to think.

John had thought about taking his pickup truck but then decided maybe they’d release him today, and Sherlock would want to ride home in his usual style, and if it unnerved people to see an old hearse parked outside a hospital, so be it. John was never going to get used to driving it in Sherlock’s absence, though. He just didn’t have the right personality for it. It felt like wearing Sherlock’s clothes, which he never would be caught dead in.

“You’re right lucky, Mr.Holmes,” said the stern-faced nurse as John walked in. “Second time musta been a dry bite or you wouldn’t be fixin’ to walk out of here any time soon, and your arm’s healin’ up faster than I seen in a long time. Someone up there was lookin’ out for you.” She nodded at John and bustled out of the room.

Sherlock was restless in his hospital bed, but he was still weak enough to allow the nurses to boss him around some. John looked with pity on his bandaged leg and arm. His forearm was still swollen and discolored, though not nearly as horrifying as it had looked before. Antivenin and antibiotics were setting him to rights slowly but surely. Sherlock squeezed a rubber ball repetitively, flexing gently, keeping himself limber.

“We almost lost you, Sherlock,” John snapped. “I almost lost you.”

“But you didn’t,” Sherlock said, fully recovered in his vocal cords if nowhere else. “And Helen Stoneman is still alive, and her young man didn’t lose her. I chose the snake which bit me. The one that I would likely survive - surely you’ve observed over the years that more people survive the bites of the native vipers than die from them. They aren’t ranked among the deadliest in the world by a long shot. For a healthy young man like myself in good physical shape, it was an acceptable level of risk. But the snake that bit Roylott - and Julia - that was a different matter. I knew from the monkey and the big cat that Roylott had an interest in exotic animals. Didn’t the coloring of the snake look a little off to you? That odd speckled, banded pattern, just a little too bright for a copperhead and the colors all wrong for a coral snake? It was a paint job, to make it blend in with the native types -- just enough to fool a crowd of half-mad tranced-out people who aren’t familiar with the species. It had to look ordinary and non-threatening, that’s all.”

“I guess these people have a whole different idea of what’s nonthreatening.” Nothing was more reassuring to John than hearing Sherlock back to being able to talk that fast.

“Indeed,” Sherlock said, chuckling, and then wincing. “So do we, John. That’s what I’ve been saying all along. We’re not so different from them in some ways. But anyway. I knew that Roylott’s interest in exotic animals extended to their medical and chemical properties - I knew from Helen’s description of his recent behaviorial changes, and from something his assistant told me when he thought I was someone else, that he might be using a substance from the glands of his pet ape to bolster both his physical strength and his, well, virility, having expressed an interest in a woman half his age from the next church over. The hypocrisy is typical of churchmen, particularly ones with a violent background like Mr. Roylott’s. Textbook pattern of repentance and relapse. The symptoms Helen had witnessed the night Julia died don’t correspond to any snake native to the United States. 

“The possibility crossed my mind that he might have taken some chemical prompting from our countercultural friends, but a few discreet inquiries suggested that wouldn’t have been likely. But the knowledge of the monkey gland properties was suggestive, as was the presence of your old comrade in arms in the trailer and his mysteriously heated storage shed. I kept that in my mind while I then wondered if - ouch - perhaps he used the strychnine to poison her in addition to the snakebite, and thus would have plausible deniability to claim she took the toxic substance herself as part of a religious rite. I suspect he would have tried that as a failsafe if the snake venom alone didn’t do the job. He couldn’t leave it to chance - or to God, if you insist on personifying circumstance - he needed to be certain that Julia would die. And she did. Having succeeded once, he’d try the same MO again. I just had to be on the lookout for a snake that looked different from the others. I have a correspondent in Florida who is an expert in venomous reptiles and their toxins, and I happened to have read his account of the bite of the Asian many-banded krait - he is one of the world’s only known survivors - and it seemed a close fit. I just had to make sure I didn’t get bitten by _that_ one.”

“That’s what that was?” John barked, feeling the room spin with increased horror. “We had those in Nam. The guys called ‘em ‘two-step Charlies’ - two steps and you’re dead.” 

“Slight exaggeration. According to Helen’s recollection, Julia managed to live for several hours. Probably would have been kinder if she hadn’t. But there wouldn’t have been anything a doctor could have done for Roylott, even if he’d betray his beliefs to see one. No reason for a hospital here to have the right antivenin even if he could get there in time.” Sherlock smiled wryly. “Just in case you’re feeling any professional guilt about tending only to me and leaving him to die.”

“No, I’ll sleep fine on that account,” John said. “I resisted the urge to kick him while he was down, that was heroic enough.”

Sherlock laughed darkly, and John smiled to see it. But still.

“Yeah, but Sherlock -“ he couldn’t even begin to spell it all out. “You still got bit twice by a normal rattler and you knew it was almost sure to happen. You could have died. And not just that. Sherlock, what if you couldn’t run as good anymore? It’s a deadly hemotoxin even if doesn’t kill as surely as Roylott’s snake did. It could have ruined your leg. Sherlock, your wrist, your beautiful hand, what if you had nerve or tissue damage that meant you couldn’t play the fiddle as good anymore ever again?”

“Your concern is multidimensional John,” Sherlock said. “You put more thought into it than I usually do.”

“Yeah well, worst-case scenarios are part of my nature,” John said. “And you bring it out in me. I can’t stand to think about bad things happening to you.”

“And yet, you’ve chosen to keep company with a man whose work puts him in harm’s way all the time,” Sherlock had a warm, wan smile on his face. “And _nearly_ always, you’re right there by my side.”

“This might not have happened if I hadn’t had such a stick up my ass about my goddamn medical ethics,” John said. “I’m cussin’ myself out all the time looking at you, believe me.”

“It might have been worse, John; you couldn’t possibly have disguised yourself as well as I did. Roylott had seen both of us. Hiding yourself and observing from a reasonable distance turned out to the best thing you could have done.”

“Well, what if I hadn’t even been there, though? It isn’t right for you to go off like that and leave me in the dark. I need to know what’s going on if I’m gonna have your back. We’re partners, Sherlock. I need you to trust me if I’m gonna trust you. What if I’d just left you there and gone all the way back home like I wanted to for a minute there?”

“You wouldn’t,” Sherlock said. “Still, though, I did manage to survive years of dangerous situations before I met you, John. I don’t need to hear you beating yourself up for abandoning a helpless little weakling who can’t take care of himself.”

“I never meant to imply-“

“Course you didn’t,” Sherlock said, smiling. 

“I still want to kick your ass for pissing me off and takin’ off like that and leaving me in the dark,” John said. “You don’t do that shit to me, alright? Tell me the plan next time and maybe you won’t have to get hurt bad and almost killed for your damn schemes to work.” John sighed and came forward and took Sherlock’s outstretched hand as the rubber ball rolled down the mattress to Sherlock’s hip. With a quick corner of the eye check to make sure there was no one looking right at them, he stole a quick kiss across Sherlock’s knuckles. “Flex your fingers for me,” John said in a low voice.

Sherlock did, as lewdly as he knew how - which was very lewd indeed. “Would you like to test my reflexes, Doctor Watson?”

“Have you ever fantasized about getting ravished in a hospital bed, Sherlock?”

“For the last two days, constantly, when I was conscious,” Sherlock said, wriggling, letting the sheets pull tight across the suggestive serpentine lump between his thighs. “Would you like to pretend I need some venom sucked out of _this?”_

“That’s goin’ a long way to convincing me you’re gonna be ready to go home soon,” John said.

“Too bad, I was hoping you’d give in to temptation and have me right here. These nurses all look like jaded old souls who’ve seen much worse.”

John shook his head, as stern as he could get at the moment - which, in his stirring lust and profound relief, wasn’t very. “Considering how few decent hospitals there are around here, I don’t think it’d be smart to get ourselves banned from any one of them.”

 

***

“A visitor to see you, Mr. Holmes.”

John eyed the hallway warily. They were still a little too close to the town ruled by Roylott’s followers for his comfort. To his relief, though, it was Helen Stoneman alone, and the expression on her face was that of a prisoner granted a stay of execution. She had a bouquet of tulips and daffodils and something gift-wrapped and rectangular in her hand.

“How are you doing, Mr. Holmes?” Helen asked.

“Much better, thank you. I hope the snake that bit me is recovering too?”

“Oh yeah, he’s all right. Arnie’s gonna take him out in the backwoods and let him go, though. Afraid he got a taste for it.”

“Well, there’ve certainly been times when what was in my veins was addictive,” Sherlock said, grinning at John as though he was getting away with something. “I’m glad I didn’t poison the poor beast. It was only following its instinct.”

“But mostly thank you,” said Helen. “That’s what I came here to say.”

“I could just as well thank you for bringing me such an unusual case,” Sherlock said. “I was getting so desperately bored I actually started to think gardening was interesting.”

She laughed. “Well, you went to a lot of trouble, and I appreciate it. I thought you’d like to know that my stepfather was buried yesterday and half the church didn’t come to his funeral. The guys he had in on it, they fled outta town like somethin’ was chasin’ em. Maybe there was. And we passed the hat around, just a few people, figured we might ought to get you something.”

Sherlock accepted the package from her with a rueful little grin. “I know what this is before I even open it,” Sherlock said, laughing. “Are you still hoping that someday I might find a use for it?”

“Well it’s a real nice old one, real leather and everything. They say that a good one can stop a bullet if it’s been prayed on enough. It’s happened.”

Sherlock smiled indulgently. “You’re going to insist on clinging to your beliefs, aren’t you?”

“Sure am,” she said a little defiantly, chin up. “I’m convinced it was the hand of the Lord that saved you and healed you.”

“Could have sworn it was the hand of Doctor Watson, as I recall it,” Sherlock said. “And maybe with an assist from some even more primitive folk magic, if I wasn’t hallucinating that bezoar in hot milk. One impossible thing is just as likely as another. Are you going to tell me your boyfriend put out that milk for the snakes?”

“Reverend told him to. Said it helped to train them.”

“Snakes don’t drink milk.”

“I reckon no one ever told him that, sir,” she said, with a sideways grin. “How did you know he was my boyfriend?”

“You mentioned him very early on in our first conversation, and you were protective of him. I found out that Roylott had tried to kill your sister’s beau to prevent that marriage, and when that failed, that was when he hatched his diabolical plan to kill Julia instead - and then when that worked, to use the same means again to kill you when it looked like you were likely to marry and move on and deprive him of your annuity from your mother’s estate, which he’d come to think of as rightfully his. Something had to be bringing the matter to a head and about to force his hand. I saw the way Arnie looked at you, and the way you looked at him. He’s not as slow as he pretends, is he?”

“No, he’s not,” she said fiercely. “He decided he’d be safer to play a little dumb around the Reverend. I think that right there should tell you he’s smart. Even if he wasn’t though, I’d love him just the same. He’s got a good heart, and that’s more important.”

“Do you think so?” Sherlock asked with a chuckle, ignoring John’s wince. “Well, if my good brain hadn’t saved you, you’d have to hope his good heart might have found a way to do it instead. And don’t worry, there’s no call to blame him for not knowing about the switch with the deadly krait. Roylott didn’t keep it with the others - it isn’t suited for this climate, and he at least knew Arnie would probably spot that something was off. It stayed in its heated shed with its antisocial keeper. Might have made its way back there, when that kid who was at the service tipped its owner off as to what had happened. Vietnam vets who grow illegal plants get very attached to their deadly defenses. I know a man near Matewan who’s named every homemade landmine in his pot patch after buddies who died.”

“You should say thank you,” John muttered. “That’s what people do when they get gifts.”

“I thank you for the Bible, Helen. I’ll cherish it even though I’ll probably never open it.”

“You should open it just once, Mr. Holmes.”

Sherlock carefully unwrapped the paper, his healing hand only shaking a little, and smiled as a small ivory card fell out from between the thin pages, and he turned it over between his fingers. “Fiancé, not boyfriend. There’s always something!”

“You and Dr. Watson and Mrs. Hudson are all invited,” she said, beaming. “You might could even play a little fiddle if I’m feelin’ scandalous.”

“Even though you still disapprove of my…lifestyle?” Sherlock said, with a smile and arched eyebrow. John couldn’t help but think that the way the painkillers loosened his tongue was risky business. Then again, Sherlock always had a big mouth on him - it was just that open smile that suggested some narcotic influence. Suggested, not proved.

“Well, the feeling’s mutual, ain’t it?” said Helen. “Bet you wish I’d stop handlin’ snakes in church. But I won’t, I still believe in it. An evil man can’t ruin God’s word.”

She waited for Sherlock to nod before she went on.

“Oh, and this comes from Arnie. That snake, he shed his skin and this broke off.” She reached in her pocket and gingerly took out a little bundle wrapped in a paper towel scrap. 

Sherlock unwrapped it cautiously. It was a few inches of rattle from a snake’s tail. 

“Now I wouldn’t know about this,” Helen said. “but Arnie says the fiddle players in his family goin’ way back, they swear by puttin’ a rattle inside the box. Keeps the wood dry, makes it sound right, protects you from jealous rivals makin’ the evil eye. I cain’t say this for sure, but I’d imagine if that devil’s work is real, it’s probably even more powerful if it comes from a snake ‘at bit you, and you lived.”  


“Violence does recoil upon the violent,” Sherlock mused. “And the schemer so often falls into the pit he has dug for another. Some would say that provides something of a rational basis for sympathetic magic. I prefer to call it patterns identified by careful observation. You may continue to call it what you like, of course.”

What John observed was the nurse stomping her way back into the room with a clipboard holding Sherlock’s release papers.

“Looks like you get to go home soon,” Helen said happily. “You’ve been blessed. And I’m keepin’ you in my prayers whether you like it or not.”

“Well, since I don’t believe that does any good, then naturally I think it can’t do me any harm either,” Sherlock sniffed.

John wanted to give him an elbow in the ribs but was not positioned to do it discreetly.

Helen just shook her head and smiled. “The Lord will know His own, Mr. Holmes.”

She reached out for his uninjured hand to shake it, and walked away singing quietly.

“Sounds like she thinks she’s gonna see you in Heaven no matter what,” John said fondly.

“Heaven sounds boring. No good criminals there.”

“Can’t argue with that. Come on now, let’s get you home.”


	11. In the Morning Sow Thy Seed

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They don't even make it all the way home before the trouser snakes wake up and want handling (the chapter title isn't about gardening!) And a good thing too, because the waiting wrath of Mrs. Hudson would be a real boner-killer.

Despite a brief struggle over the hearse keys, with Sherlock simpering and sighing in the passenger seat, John felt a good deal more like all was right with the world again. All was not right with the weather, though - the skies grew heavy and the spring woods by the road turned twilight-dark as the railroad tracks and the occasional half-abandoned spurt of a town whizzed by. John didn’t think they’d be able to beat the rain.

“In about a half a mile, there’s a junction with an overgrown dirt road that leads to a clearing in the woods full of abandoned coke kilns. No one has worked there since the 50s. It’s a perfect place to pull over.”

“Why we gotta pull over, Sherlock?” John asked. He had insisted on taking the wheel of the hearse, to let Sherlock rest and let sleep and painkillers do their good work as much as possible. His passenger-patient wasn’t having the good taste to rest and be quiet though. “Are you okay? Are you feeling sick?”

“You made promises, John,” Sherlock said. He leaned over, and with his good hand he gave a sweeping, firm caress of John’s thigh.

“I don’t think it’s a good idea to get your pulse racing just yet,” John said, trying to ignore the constriction in his jeans.

“Too late,” Sherlock said, chuckling. “I promise I’ll find a position where I can keep my arm and leg lowered if you’ll feel better. But I’m well out of the woods medically so it’s time to take a little time in the woods, literally.”

“Mm,” John said. “Light me a cigarette and I’ll think about it.”

Sherlock did so - out of the pack in John’s shirt pocket, not his own, and Sherlock took serious care to make sure his fingers and the shifting little box made as much contact with the skin of John’s chest as possible. Sherlock took a few languid drags of it before handing it over, pursing his decadent lips and blowing wispy rings.

John took the cigarette and sucked at it before setting it down in the hearse ashtray. He flicked on the radio to subdue his thoughts. Dammit, you always gotta cycle through a lot of preaching, and static, and staticky preaching before landing on any decent music. Staticky music. Clear-signal rock station at last, praise be.

_Seasons don’t fear the reaper,_  
_Nor do the wind, the sun or the rain,_  
_We can be like they are,_  
_Come on baby…_

Sherlock laughed deep and dark beneath the clean-toned mournfully pealing guitars. John tried to look away as Sherlock’s good hand palmed his own cock in his tight pants, squeezing obscenely.

_Don’t fear the reaper_

“That song turn you on?” John asked, hands clenching on the wheel and beginning to sweat. That old driveway to the abandoned place Sherlock mentioned had to be coming up soon. Dammit, he was going to take it, wasn’t he? He was. “You’re morbid. Death gets you hot. Bones give you a boner.”

“We both remember where and when we first kissed, John. The first time we acknowledged we were hot for each other. The first time you touched _this_ —“ damn him, that was the luscious head of his cock now freed from his zipper, gleaming in the gloaming. “You were no less hard than me. You’d have finished the job in no time flat if we weren’t interrupted. It’s not the song, it’s not death, it’s _you and me._ Pull over so we can fuck.”

“Yes sir,” John said resignedly. They weren’t that far from home, after all, and if anything went wrong they had the CB - which John always had to double-check and make sure it was turned off, he wouldn’t put it past Sherlock to leave it on and give Lestrade a little radio play.

The old row of coke ovens being slowly reclaimed by scrubby trees was creepy as hell, in the way of abandoned places once full of human bustle and now being reconquered by the ancient mountains with their lack of care for human endeavor. In the dim dappled light below the forest canopy, the ovens looked like crumbling tombs.

“Sherlock, you’re still healing,” John finally said as he pulled the hearse to rest. “Be careful.”

“Mmm, yes,” Sherlock said, opening the passenger side door and stepping out. He only swayed a little. “Open the back, John, and let’s get in there. I’ve got KY, promise.”

John eyed him sideways, watching Sherlock wobble towards the rear of the vehicle. Holding his gaze, Sherlock started to strip as best he could, which was insufficient. Sherlock managed to bare his chest and open his pants but he had to work at it with one hand at half strength.

Sherlock shimmied through his mess of clutter in the hearse back, caressing himself, cajoling John to get on top of him. John shook his head for a moment and then zeroed in on Sherlock’s cock, still struggling but almost fully erect despite all the odds against that. Just on theorizing and talk and fantasy. John hadn’t even touched it, and he knew that Sherlock wanted him to. Desperately. He might want to play that off a little while. Sherlock would expect nothing less.

“You alright there, Sherlock?” John asked, teasing, crawling in. “You got everything you need? Cigarettes? A good book?”

“Everything except you,” Sherlock snapped.

“You got me,” John said.

“Good. Would you like to help me with a little physical therapy? Repetitive motion?”

John snickered a moment and shook his head, fixing Sherlock with a steady hungry gaze, letting him know the time for godawful pickup lines was passing by. He leaned in and crawled over Sherlock, letting his hand trail up the side of Sherlock’s leg the whole way, up his side, and over his chest until John was in position to brace himself on his hands over him. “You don’t ever give up, do you? Look at you. You’re still pale and sick lookin.’ Not half-dead anymore, but still about a quarter dead. I should lose my license for even thinkin’ about fucking you where you’re in this bad shape.”

Sherlock drew in a sharp breath and groped at John’s hips, thrusting up with his own. “I think I know by now what I can take and what I can’t.” 

“Yeah, that’s the fucked-up thing,” John said, lowering his face, his nose nuzzling at Sherlock’s. “You do, don’t you? You’re a fuckin’ war zone of sex. You’re going and going, and you want and you want. And you need to rest but you can’t till something shuts you down, yeah? So I reckon I’m mighty biased and full of conflict of interest, but there ain’t no other doctor here to treat you but me, and my diagnosis is that you’re only gonna get the sleep you really need to heal after someone has worked you hard enough to wear you out.”

“John,” Sherlock said, panting, eyes only slightly glassy. “Thank you for falling for my manipulations so quickly. Normally I’d be up for drawing the foreplay out further by you playing dumb a little longer, but I appreciate your straightforwardness now.” With his good hand he yanked John’s head down to his with a ruthless grasp, and kissed him inexorably.

John gave out a little high-pitched sound, completely out of his control, as Sherlock plundered his mouth. But he still managed to reach out to Sherlock’s bandaged arm, and hold it down.

“I know you like to provoke me to get me to play rough,” he growled. “I’m all for it. When you’re healthy. You’re not.” He squeezed Sherlock’s wrist, and watched the resulting wince with some satisfaction. “We’re not gonna bite and scratch and roll the hearse. We’re gonna make love slow and easy, and by God, you’re gonna like it.”

“Mmm, yes, John,” Sherlock said, reaching up for more kisses. “Hold me down and force tenderness on me. You brute.”

“You…are…so…brilliantly perverse. Perversely brilliant.” John leaned up, finishing the last buttons of Sherlock’s shirt, laying him open to the caress of wandering fingertips. John leaned down and kissed the side of his neck, working his way down Sherlock’s right shoulder. Familiarity had spent all this time only breeding sharper, stronger, more refined and specialized desire. The fine hairs on Sherlock’s chest seemed to bristle and rise up to his light touch in that way that he loved, Sherlock’s sharper, deeper breaths animating him beneath John’s caresses. “We’re not in a hurry to go home.”

“I suppose not,” Sherlock murmured as a burst of rolling thunder almost drowned him out. His good hand worked quickly at John’s belt buckle, opening it up, popping the top button on his jeans. “This storm will hold us.”

John wriggled his hips, slowly, enough to allow Sherlock to work his pants down one-handed, groaning softly as his cock bounced out into cool air, and Sherlock was quick to caress it, engulfing as much as he could of it in his vast hand. John lightly bit his way back up Sherlock’s throat, over the little cliff of his chin to get back to those lips. As they kissed again, Sherlock moved obscenely, working John’s cock into the crease between his thighs, taut skin grinding on denim. John closed his eyes and saw the flash of lightning in the dark red of his eyelids as he savored Sherlock head to toe.

“How do you want it?” Sherlock asked softly, clenching his weaker hand around the back of John’s neck. “Oh, is my hand up too high? Not lower than my heart? If you want it there, then…I’m not going to stop touching you….so something has to change.” He laughed low in his throat, and before John could even register fully what was happening, Sherlock had flipped them. 

Now pressed nearly against the left wall of the coffin compartment, on top of years of newspapers and emergency supplies and God knows what else, John was awkwardly half-naked and squirming underneath Sherlock, who had in one swift motion entangled their legs in an elegant knot. “Oh, you want it slow and sweet. Good.” Sherlock’s voice slowed and bent its vowels into a lazy summery Deep South accent like some kind of _Gone With the Wind_ extra. “Good, that’s good…um, I guess I didn’t think this through, would you be a good sweet loverman and take my cock _all_ the way out like I forgot to do? I _did_ almost die, after all.” There was literal batting of literal eyelashes.

John laughed so hard his head hit the edge of a metal toolbox painfully. “You manipulative son of a bitch,” he said, as he did what he was told and almost lost it right there at the first touch of wet need, velvet slide, Sherlock’s gasp. 

The scent of rain mingled with the scent of Sherlock - sweat and antiseptic and pheromones - as John stroked him with one hand and finished wriggling out of his jeans and underwear with the other. Sherlock lowered onto him and John adjusted his grip as best he could to take both of them, shaft to shaft, pulsing together. Sherlock made a low purring sound as he nipped at John’s neck, his injured arm curling under John’s shoulder as Sherlock leaned weight on his elbow and started to roll his hips. He gave a frustrated little sound as he hooked his good hand under John’s thigh and hoisted it up, sweaty grip sliding up to the back of John’s knee, opening him wide and pressing in, close, sliding the head of his cock out of John’s hand and into the crease between balls and thigh, aiming lower. “KY in the box below your head, John,” Sherlock murmured before he sucked for a moment on John’s earlobe, completely derailing his mind.

“You are a fuckin’ madman. You really want to…”

“If you’ll let me,” Sherlock said, licking that incredibly sensitive spot below and behind John’s ear, “and I think you will. You said you want it slow, so luckily that’s exactly how I want to do it.”

“Thought I was gonna be in charge of enforcing that,” John said, rummaging in the box over his head to find the gel, bringing it out and laying it down, and then letting his hands slide down as far as they could to cup Sherlock’s taut ass. God, John could get where he wanted to be just from this, just grabbing Sherlock and rocking him and letting him rut between his thighs, up against his cock and balls just like that, fuck yeah. Damn. He was too far ahead of himself. He was in no state to be bossing Sherlock around, and Sherlock would sure as hell pick up on that.

“You can be,” Sherlock said indulgently. “Here, why don’t you let me watch you finger yourself down here while I do things to you with my mouth?” 

“You really are suspiciously healthy,” John said, managing to work the cap off the tube and squeeze a dollop one-handed. If it leaked all over, that was going to be Sherlock’s problem. “Suspiciously fast recovery. Should I tell Mrs. Hudson her mad-stone worked?”

“Might as well tell Helen her faith-healing worked,” Sherlock said. “But I still think it was the laying-on of _your_ hands.”

“I mean it, Sherlock,” John said, trying in vain to keep his medical authority. “You’ve got to take it slow. You get too worked up, and I’ll make you stop, I swear I will.”

“No, you won’t.”

No, he didn’t.

John did as Sherlock asked, working the lube into his own hole while Sherlock watched in rapt delight close by, just propping himself up on his elbows over John’s torso and paying close attention to important points with his eyes and his nose and his mouth, inappropriately sniffing and nuzzling, appropriately biting and licking.

Sherlock reached out and reverently ran his fingertips over John’s hand and wrist as John worked, and then licked the base of John’s cock and the top of his sac with a perfectly obscene lather, leaving broad wet trails. John groaned as his body involuntarily arched and his thigh muscles tightened as his legs opened.

Sherlock didn’t quite have his usual power and grace - though he’d been well bandaged and medicated, he still had stiffness in his limbs, and with John’s trained eye he could see the twinges of pain and frustration when Sherlock’s muscles didn’t behave as they ought. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” John groaned, reaching up with his other hand to press the side of Sherlock’s hip. “We said slow.”

“Mmm,” Sherlock agreed. “You’ll have to be the flexible one this time.”

“I’ll manage - here, like this,” John murmured, lifting his good leg — _no no you fool, they’re both good legs_ — up to the level of Sherlock’s waist, and wrapping it. Sherlock’s hips lunged forward, and John’s hand slithered down between them, stroking Sherlock’s cock with cool slick gel that quickly heated as his hand moved and his fingers tugged at Sherlock’s most sensitive skin.

Sherlock moaned and pressed forward, lightly fucking John’s hand and begging with his body for help. “Please,” he said.

“Please what?” John asked - pumping, guiding, caressing as best he could.

“Help me,” Sherlock murmured, leaning down on his elbows, hips squirming towards his goal. “Put me in you.”

That did it. Those words in that voice electrified John, melted him, commanded him, and he drew the head of Sherlock’s cock right to his entrance and swirled it around a little to help open up. Then he tugged a little, pushed a little, and then pulled him in, easy and smooth. They both shivered and groaned, rocking together slowly as they joined, and Sherlock buried his face for a moment in the crook of John’s neck, right before he started to thrust with cautious rolling motions. “I mean it now,” John gasped as Sherlock moved so good, so right, just perfectly there, and John grabbed Sherlock’s hair at the nape of his neck. “Easy now. Don’t you hurt yourself again.”

“I have a doctor handy,” Sherlock said, his voice purring and slurred. His impaired, aching arm still scrabbled to grasp John’s thigh around his side. “And there’s no sin . . . in putting myself . . . in his hands.”

“That ain’t my hand you’re in right now,” John chuckled, clenching his legs and arching up, feeling sweat start to soak through Sherlock’s shirt, finding it smelled wholesome and healthy - just the clean rutting sweat of sex in close quarters, not a trace of sickness or poison. Sherlock buried his face against John again and started to murmur, a strange litany of nonsense syllables. “Speakin’ in tongues?”

Sherlock said nothing in English but brought his tongue around to John’s mouth, where he put it to better, if more conventional use.

Their movements settled into a familiar, rocking pace, bodies locked together in just the right way as they tasted each other, Sherlock bending his back just so to compensate for the height difference. He only slightly winced in pain as his ankle was lightly jostled with each pulse and slide. John leaned his head back and nudged Sherlock up a little, enough to get some space in between them, and then he started to jack his own cock, slow and lewd, giving Sherlock a show.

John had never thought of himself as an especially handsome man, nothing like the hardbodied models in those old physique mags he knew that gay men liked, but Sherlock’s rapt attention gave him an ego boost - the way Sherlock never ever seemed to get enough of watching John get himself off. A little bit of a stroking demonstration could bring Sherlock nearly to the edge all by itself, and to give him this nice close-up look while Sherlock was buried balls-deep in him, well all for the better now. Because Sherlock was doing an admirable job of fucking him almost at full-strength, and John was still doctor enough to know that shouldn’t go on too much longer.

A roaring blast of thunder startled them, and heavy curtains of rain bathed the hearse’s windows as they steamed it with their breath.

Sherlock was literally drooling as he peered down, fixated on the motions of John’s hand, unconsciously replicating the rhythm with his hips. Then Sherlock gave a strangled sound of pain and pleasure at once as his leg cramped and his body tensed, and then he was shaking and whimpering as he came. John groaned at him in encouragement, “God that feels good, you filling me up, yeah, give it to me…” his hand sped to a blur. Sherlock’s eyes flew back open to catch the climax of the performance, and only just shut them fast enough to avoid getting stung by the hot jets on his face. Eyes still closed, by scent and feel he bent down to aim the last spurts onto his chest. Carefully Sherlock withdrew his softening cock and lowered his head to lick John’s cock clean.

“You’re fucking amazing,” John said, stroking his sweaty hair and feeling his racing pulse with only a little worry.

“Sure you have those words in the right order?” Sherlock said with a weary smirk as he wiped between John’s thighs with the sleeve of his shirt.

“That too,” John said. “C’mere.”

Sherlock crawled back up into John’s arms and settled with a slight oof sound, his full weight on John’s chest. They didn’t speak for a long time, just drifted in the rush of the rain and the feel of each other’s breath and pulse. John flailed around a little in the clutter at his side until he managed to produce a ratty blanket and pillow. Sherlock’s eyelids sagged as he rested his head on John’s shoulder.

“Not going anywhere for a while,” John murmured, glancing up at the water-shrouded windshield. “Tell you what, though, why don’t you just lie down here and take a nap while I drive us the rest of the way home. You need your rest.”

“Don’t need a nap,” Sherlock pouted as his eyes started to drift shut.

“Do too,” John said, stroking Sherlock’s wet hair as he maneuvered Sherlock’s head onto the pillow. There were some signs he knew how to read too, and he was pretty sure Sherlock would be asleep before he could even get to the driver’s seat. John looked down on him with overwhelming fondness as he shimmied his jeans back on in the narrow space, only wincing a little at the slipperiness and slight ache. It was worth a wince and a little wetness to know the depth of Sherlock’s endurance and lust.

But no sooner had he started to crawl away than Sherlock reached out with his good hand, quick as a snake’s strike, eyes going wide. “Sshh!” he whispered. “Hold still. Keep your head down but see what you can see.”

Along the wall of crumbling coke ovens overgrown with young trees, John saw a hunkering shape in the shivering rain-fog. It crept down the cracked and broken road warily - it seemed hunched as if trying to keep low and possibly imitate an animal, but John had seen too many field tricks to be fooled by that.

“This is old Easton-Bolan land,” Sherlock murmured.

John scrambled his sex-slowed mind to find the relevance. “Wait - our first case. When we first met. The coal company that…?”

“Yes,” Sherlock said. He seemed to allow himself to drift toward drowsiness again, so he didn’t seem to think a threat was imminent.

Well, if John had thought to drift off for a little while next to Sherlock in that sweet after-sex doze, that put an end to that. He kissed Sherlock’s sleeping forehead and crawled into the driver’s seat, unstashing his revolver from the glove compartment just in case.

The windshield wipers kept up a steady beat. John Fogerty wasn’t reassuring.

_I went down Virginia,_  
_Seeking shelter from the storm_  
_Caught up in the fable,_  
_I watched the tower grow…_

_Who’ll stop the rain, indeed._ John barely saw another car on the wet road all the way back to Stanger - except for one coal truck swerving across both lanes on a sharp bend like it owned the place. Which its owner likely did. Nothing necessarily sinister, they all did that. But he wasn’t at ease, not until he made the turn up the little gravel spur of Route 221 that was home.

The hearse crackled gravel heavily as John turned up the switchback past his own pretty-much-abandoned trailer, headed around the little bend past Mrs. Hudson’s cottage.

And he stopped at the sight of the figure who walked right out into the road and stood firm. The rain was slowing, but it hadn’t stopped by a long shot. In the gray haze, in her hat and coat with her swaying umbrella, Mrs. Hudson looked like an avenging-angel version of Mary Poppins.

John stopped and gestured in a way that meant something he’d never say to her face. She waved imperiously, flagging them into her driveway. John sighed and complied, because there was no other reply to that expression.

As he pulled in, he rolled down his window to hear her shouting above the rain. “Where is he? Where is that dead boy?”

“In the back, where a dead boy belongs,” John said, popping the hatch open.

Sherlock sat up suddenly and hit his head on the ceiling. John remembered he hadn’t really bothered to help get him fully decent, and Sherlock scrambled to bunch the blanket over his lap as she let him have it both barrels. “You’re like a son to me, Sherlock Holmes,” she snarled, finger in his face. “You too, John. I thank God every day you’ve got a good man to look out for you, and you still act like your life is your all own to throw away if you just feel like it. You’re like a son to me, I say. You better not ever make me bury you. You better not, y’hear?”

John was awestruck. Sherlock was tugging at his hair and wincing under the onslaught. “John told me you gave us, um, that thing…” he muttered, half-asleep and all sheepish.

“That’s right, and I also made you a tea. And I’ll tell you this, Sherlock, it tastes plumb awful. It’s gonna put hair on your chest and then make it all fall off again. You gonna curse me and you gonna curse your mama and I swear to God it’s gonna be the worst thing you ever put in your mouth - don’t start, I don’t even wanna know what all else’s been in there - and I’m gonna watch you drink it all, you hear me?”

“That’s what the old folks always said,” John drawled, getting out of the driver’s seat and sauntering around to watch the fun. “The worse it tastes, the better it works.”

“Okay,” Sherlock said, sighing. That very submissiveness alone convinced John he still needed some work done on him. “Can I just, well?” He was struggling with his fly. Mrs. Hudson huffed and turned around, stomping toward the house. “I did solve the case,” Sherlock murmured pathetically. “I saved Helen.”

“You sure did,” John said, savoring the sensation of his lingering anger melting away now that someone else had given Sherlock the talking-to he really deserved. “And she’s gonna be so proud of you when she gets done bein’ furious. You know that. She always is.”

Sherlock nodded. “And you saved me. Don’t ever think I don’t know that.”

“I sure did,” John said, helping Sherlock arrange himself into a semblance of dignity, fixing his scarf into a sling for his still-stiff arm. “Glad to do it too. Don’t ever think I won’t do it gladly every time you let me. But you better always let me.”

Sherlock leaned on John willingly, his hand on John’s ass unnecessarily, but he avoided John’s eyes for a moment before accepting and returning a stolen kiss.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bibliography:
> 
> https://www.nytimes.com/1976/06/06/archives/they-shall-take-up-serpents-serpents.html (1976 article)
> 
> _Them That Believe: The Power and Meaning of the Christian Serpent-Handling Tradition_ by Ralph Hood and W. Paul Williamson, a scholarly and respectful collection of essays on various aspects of this culture.
> 
> _Taking Up Serpents: Snake-Handlers of Eastern Kentucky_ by David L. Kimbrough, another respectful overview.
> 
> _Salvation on Sand Mountain: Snake-Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia_ by Dennis Covington, a somewhat sensationalistic true-crime account of an Alabama preacher convicted of trying to murder his wife by forcing her to be bitten repeatedly at gunpoint.
> 
> _Holy Ghost People,_ Peter Adair's 1967 documentary film about snake-handling in a small WV town. (Peter Adair is probably best known for this and for his very influential 1970s LGBT documentary _The Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives_ ; Adair, who was gay, and his sister Nancy, a lesbian, collaborated on one of the first positive films about gay culture.)
> 
> All chapter titles are Pentecostal Hymns, taken from this site: http://www.traditionalmusic.co.uk/hymns-pentecostal/
> 
> Other memorable titles include: _Let Him Have His Way With Thee, By The Time They Find Me Missing, Nothing But The Blood, God Reached Below Bottom For Me, God Walks The Dark Hills, See The Conqueror Mounts In Triumph, Sinful Sighing To Be Blest, Sinners Turn Why Will Ye Die, So Unworthy Of The Blood, That Day Of Wrath That Dreadful Day, Hide Me Oh Blessed Rock Of Ages, Hillbilly Heaven, Ho Reapers In The Whitened Harvest, How Did The Goats Get In, How Tedious And Tasteless, There Is A Fountain Filled With Blood, I May Not Need These Grave Clothes, Though The Angry Surges Roll, Through All The Dangers Of The Night,  Wish Somebodys Soul Would Catch On Fire, Tossd With Rough Winds And Faint With Fear, Traveling The Highway Home, Troublesome Waters, Im Climbing Up On The Rough Side Of The Mountain, When The Pale Horse And His Rider Goes By, and of O Almighty Use Thy Rod,_ not to mention the remarkable _There Is An Eye That Never Sleeps,_ which I suspect must come from a songcatcher who actually did walk into Mordor.
> 
> Here's a great website about snake-related folklore, the source of the rattle-in-the-fiddle legend: http://nativeground.com/rattlesnake-fangs-fiddles-folklore/
> 
>  The rock songs quoted in this chapter are "(Don't Fear) the Reaper" by Blue Öyster Cult (1976, so brand new in this story) and "Who'll Stop the Rain" by Creedence Clearwater Revival (1970).
> 
> In Chapter 10, Sherlock refers to a snake expert in Florida that he corresponded with, who gave him the final clue about the deadly Asian krait. He was talking about Bill Haast (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Haast) director of the Miami Serpentorium Labs, who according to Guinness Book of Records was bitten by poisonous snakes 172 times during the course of his life - and died of natural causes in 2011 at the ripe old age of 100.
> 
>  
> 
> But I have my own snake-expert correspondent in Florida who was of invaluable help to me: thanks to [WhoGroovesOn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/WhoGroovesOn/pseuds/WhoGroovesOn). (I took liberties. All errors or fabrications are purely my own). I promised WGO that no snakes would be killed in this story.


End file.
